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?

Answer 1

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).