format {base}R Documentation

Encode in a Common Format

Description

Format an R object for pretty printing: format.pval is intended for formatting p-values.

Usage

format(x, ...)

## S3 method for class 'AsIs':
format(x, width = 12, ...)

## S3 method for class 'data.frame':
format(x, ..., justify = "none")

## Default S3 method:
format(x, trim = FALSE, digits = NULL,
       nsmall = 0, justify = c("left", "right", "none"),
       big.mark = "",   big.interval = 3,
     small.mark = "", small.interval = 5,
   decimal.mark = ".", ...)

## S3 method for class 'factor':
format(x, ...)

format.pval(pv, digits = max(1, getOption("digits") - 2),
            eps = .Machine$double.eps, na.form = "NA")

prettyNum(x, big.mark = "",   big.interval = 3,
           small.mark = "", small.interval = 5,
         decimal.mark = ".", ...)

Arguments

x any R object (conceptually); typically numeric.
trim logical; if TRUE, leading blanks are trimmed off the strings.
digits how many significant digits are to be used for numeric x. The default, NULL, uses options()$digits. This is a suggestion: enough decimal places will be used so that the smallest (in magnitude) number has this many significant digits.
nsmall number of digits which will always appear to the right of the decimal point in formatting real/complex numbers in non-scientific formats. Allowed values 0 <= nsmall <= 20.
justify should character vector be left-justified, right-justified or left alone. When justifying, the field width is that of the longest string.
big.mark character; if not empty used as mark between every big.interval decimals before (hence big) the decimal point.
big.interval see big.mark above; defaults to 3.
small.mark character; if not empty used as mark between every small.interval decimals after (hence small) the decimal point.
small.interval see small.mark above; defaults to 5.
decimal.mark the character used to indicate the numeric decimal point.
pv a numeric vector.
eps a numerical tolerance: see Details.
na.form character representation of NAs.
width the returned vector has elements of at most width.
... further arguments passed to or from other methods.

Details

These functions convert their first argument to a vector (or array) of character strings which have a common format (as is done by print), fulfilling length(format*(x, *)) == length(x). The trimming with trim = TRUE is useful when the strings are to be used for plot axis annotation.

format.AsIs deals with columns of complicated objects that have been extracted from a data frame.

format.pval is mainly an auxiliary function for print.summary.lm etc., and does separate formatting for fixed, floating point and very small values; those less than eps are formatted as "< [eps]" (where “[eps]” stands for format(eps, digits).

The function formatC provides a rather more flexible formatting facility for numbers, but does not provide a common format for several numbers, nor it is platform-independent.

format.data.frame formats the data frame column by column, applying the appropriate method of format for each column.

prettyNum is the utility function for prettifying x. If x is not a character, format(x[i], ...) is applied to each element, and then it is left unchanged if all the other arguments are at their defaults. Note that prettyNum(x) may behave unexpectedly if x is a character not resulting from something like format(<number>).

Note

Currently format drops trailing zeroes, so format(6.001, digits=2) gives "6" and format(c(6.0, 13.1), digits=2) gives c(" 6", "13").

Character(s) " in input strings x are escaped to \".

References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

See Also

format.info indicates how something would be formatted; formatC, paste, as.character, sprintf.

Examples

format(1:10)

zz <- data.frame("(row names)"= c("aaaaa", "b"), check.names=FALSE)
format(zz)
format(zz, justify="left")

## use of nsmall
format(13.7)
format(13.7, nsmall=3)

r <- c("76491283764.97430", "29.12345678901", "-7.1234", "-100.1","1123")
## American:
prettyNum(r, big.mark = ",")
## Some Europeans:
prettyNum(r, big.mark = "'", decimal.mark = ",")

(dd <- sapply(1:10, function(i)paste((9:0)[1:i],collapse="")))
prettyNum(dd, big.mark="'")

pN <- stats::pnorm(1:7, lower=FALSE)
cbind(format (pN, small.mark = " ", digits = 15))
cbind(formatC(pN, small.mark = " ", digits = 17, format = "f"))

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