Convert float to string in R without losing precision

Question

I need to convert a dataframe of floats with 2-decimal point precision to strings. However, as.character drops zeros in the decimal part:

> as.character(1.00)         


        

Answer 1

We can use sprintf

sprintf("%0.2f", 1.10)
#[1] "1.10"
sprintf("%0.2f", 1.00)
#[1] "1.00"

Answer 2

We can also use the format function with the nsmall argument to be 2.

format(1, nsmall = 2)
# [1] "1.00"
format(1.1, nsmall = 2)
# [1] "1.10"