[R] Writing to a file with fixed precision

[YIHSU CHEN]

Dear R users;

A follow-up question regarding writing to a file with fixed precision:

Assuming for each column of x, I would like to have a different format, then I modify the code as:

x.fmt <- apply(x, 1, function(x) sprintf("%.14f %.10f %2.5f", x))

where three different formats are %.14f %.10f %2.5f. 
The error message I got is "Error in sprintf(fmt, ...) : too few arguments". 

If put %1$.14f %2$.10f %3$2.5f. instead, a different error message becomes:
"Error in sprintf(fmt, ...) : reference to non-existent argument 2"

I do not exactly know what the problem is, or is there a more elegant way of completing this task.

 Thank you

Yihsu Chen
The Johns Hopkins University







On Mon, 10 Oct 2005, Marc Schwartz wrote:

> On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 19:50 -0400, Richard Hedger wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I'm trying to ouput to a filled with a fixed precision:
>> eg. if I have data x=c(1.0,1.4,2.0), I want to be able to ouput the following to a file:
>> 1.00000000000000
>> 1.40000000000000
>> 2.00000000000000
>> I was wondering if there was a function to do this in R?
>> Thanks,
>> Richard
>
> It is possible that someone has written such a function somewhere.

It's called format().

x <- c(1.0,1.4,2.0)
write(format(x, nsmall=14))

does this.

> However, this is relatively easy using write.table(). You just need to
> pre-format the numeric values prior to writing to the file:
>
> write.table(sprintf("%.14f", x), "data.txt", col.names = FALSE,
> row.names = FALSE, quote = FALSE)
>
> Using sprintf(), we force the floats to have 14 decimal places.
> sprintf() outputs character vectors, so we remove the quoting of the
> resultant character vectors and don't write column/row names.
>
> Note that if 'x' is a matrix, using sprintf() will return a vector. So
> you might want to use the following instead to retain the dims:
>
>> x
> [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
> [1,] 1 4 7 10
> [2,] 2 5 8 11
> [3,] 3 6 9 12
>
>> x.fmt <- apply(x, 1, function(x) sprintf("%.14f", x))
>
>> x.fmt
> [,1] [,2] [,3]
> [1,] "1.00000000000000" "2.00000000000000" "3.00000000000000"
> [2,] "4.00000000000000" "5.00000000000000" "6.00000000000000"
> [3,] "7.00000000000000" "8.00000000000000" "9.00000000000000"
> [4,] "10.00000000000000" "11.00000000000000" "12.00000000000000"
>
>> write.table(x.fmt, "data.txt", col.names = FALSE, row.names = FALSE,
> quote = FALSE)
>
>
> If needed, you can of course change the default delimiter from a " " to
> another character in write.table().
>
> See ?write.table and ?sprintf. 
Yihsu Chen
The Johns Hopkins University