Dear useRs I’m encountering an unexpected behaviour when trying to apply format(x, scientific = TRUE) on integer vectors (but not double vectors). The resulting string is not formatted in scientific notation, however, using formatC() instead, the result is as expected.
Is this the expected behaviour of format(x, scientific = TRUE)? I haven’t found any information or discussion on a difference in scientific notation between format and formatC. Both functions are implemented as .Internal() functions in C, and while do_formatC() uses C’s directly built-in capabilities to format, do_format() does additional work. Unfortunately my knowledge of R internals is not good enough to see why format() treats integers differently in this case. Warm regards, Remo SessionInfo and code to reproduce the issue with output (was also reproduced on Windows 10 x64 R 4.1.0 and RStudio Cloud R 3.6.3 & R 4.0.3): > sessionInfo() R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18) Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit) Running under: macOS Big Sur 10.16 Matrix products: default BLAS: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.1/Resources/lib/libRblas.dylib LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.1/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib locale: [1] de_CH.UTF-8/de_CH.UTF-8/de_CH.UTF-8/C/de_CH.UTF-8/de_CH.UTF-8 attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] compiler_4.1.0 > Sys.getlocale() [1] "de_CH.UTF-8/de_CH.UTF-8/de_CH.UTF-8/C/de_CH.UTF-8/de_CH.UTF-8" > > numvec <- c(-1.23e4, 1.23e4) > typeof(numvec) # double [1] "double" > > intvec <- c(-1.23e4L, 1.23e4L) > typeof(intvec) # integer [1] "integer" > > numvec2 <- as.double(intvec) > identical(numvec, numvec2) [1] TRUE > > formatC(numvec, format = "e") # Formatted as scientific notation [1] "-1.2300e+04" "1.2300e+04" > format(numvec, scientific = TRUE) # Formatted as scientific notation [1] "-1.23e+04" " 1.23e+04" > > formatC(intvec, format = "e") # Formatted as scientific notation [1] "-1.2300e+04" "1.2300e+04" > format(intvec, scientific = TRUE) # *Not* formatted as scientific notation [1] "-12300" " 12300" > > formatC(numvec2, format = "e") # Formatted as scientific notation [1] "-1.2300e+04" "1.2300e+04" > format(numvec2, scientific = TRUE) # Formatted as scientific notation [1] "-1.23e+04" " 1.23e+04" ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
