Formatting Decimal places in R

Question

I have a number, for example 1.128347132904321674821 that I would like to show as only two decimal places when output to screen (or written to a file). How does one do that?

x <- 1.128347132904321674821

EDIT:

The use of:

options(digits=2)

Has been suggested as a possible answer. Is there a way to specify this within a script for one-time use? When I add it to my script it doesn't seem to do anything different and I'm not interested in a lot of re-typing to format each number (I'm automating a very large report).

--

Answer: round(x, digits=2)

Solution 1

Background: Some answers suggested on this page (e.g., signif, options(digits=...)) do not guarantee that a certain number of decimals are displayed for an arbitrary number. I presume this is a design feature in R whereby good scientific practice involves showing a certain number of digits based on principles of "significant figures". However, in many domains (e.g., APA style, business reports) formatting requirements dictate that a certain number of decimal places are displayed. This is often done for consistency and standardisation purposes rather than being concerned with significant figures.

Solution:

The following code shows exactly two decimal places for the number x.

format(round(x, 2), nsmall = 2)

For example:

format(round(1.20, 2), nsmall = 2)
# [1] "1.20"
format(round(1, 2), nsmall = 2)
# [1] "1.00"
format(round(1.1234, 2), nsmall = 2)
# [1] "1.12"

A more general function is as follows where x is the number and k is the number of decimals to show. trimws removes any leading white space which can be useful if you have a vector of numbers.

specify_decimal <- function(x, k) trimws(format(round(x, k), nsmall=k))

E.g.,

specify_decimal(1234, 5)
# [1] "1234.00000"
specify_decimal(0.1234, 5)
# [1] "0.12340"

Discussion of alternatives:

The formatC answers and sprintf answers work fairly well. But they will show negative zeros in some cases which may be unwanted. I.e.,

formatC(c(-0.001), digits = 2, format = "f")
# [1] "-0.00"
sprintf(-0.001, fmt = '%#.2f')
# [1] "-0.00"

One possible workaround to this is as follows:

formatC(as.numeric(as.character(round(-.001, 2))), digits = 2, format = "f")
# [1] "0.00" 

Solution 2

You can format a number, say x, up to decimal places as you wish. Here x is a number with many decimal places. Suppose we wish to show up to 8 decimal places of this number:

x = 1111111234.6547389758965789345
y = formatC(x, digits = 8, format = "f")
# [1] "1111111234.65473890"

Here format="f" gives floating numbers in the usual decimal places say, xxx.xxx, and digits specifies the number of digits. By contrast, if you wanted to get an integer to display you would use format="d" (much like sprintf).

Solution 3

You can try my package formattable.

> # devtools::install_github("renkun-ken/formattable")
> library(formattable)
> x <- formattable(1.128347132904321674821, digits = 2, format = "f")
> x
[1] 1.13

The good thing is, x is still a numeric vector and you can do more calculations with the same formatting.

> x + 1
[1] 2.13

Even better, the digits are not lost, you can reformat with more digits any time :)

> formattable(x, digits = 6, format = "f")
[1] 1.128347

Solution 4

for 2 decimal places assuming that you want to keep trailing zeros

sprintf(5.5, fmt = '%#.2f')

which gives

[1] "5.50"

As @mpag mentions below, it seems R can sometimes give unexpected values with this and the round method e.g. sprintf(5.5550, fmt='%#.2f') gives 5.55, not 5.56

Solution 5

If you prefer significant digits to fixed digits then, the signif command might be useful:

> signif(1.12345, digits = 3)
[1] 1.12
> signif(12.12345, digits = 3)
[1] 12.1
> signif(12345.12345, digits = 3)
[1] 12300

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