Devin Marlin
2022-Jul-14 19:53 UTC
[Rd] Feature Request: Allow Underscore Separated Numbers
Hello, After using R for a number of years, and venturing into other languages, I've noticed the ones with the ability to enter numbers separated by underscores for readability (like 100000 as 100_000) make life a whole lot easier, especially when debugging. Is this a feature that could be implemented in R? Regards, -- *Devin Marlin* [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
@vi@e@gross m@iii@g oii gm@ii@com
2022-Jul-15 00:21 UTC
[Rd] Feature Request: Allow Underscore Separated Numbers
Devin, I cannot say anyone wants to tweak R after the fact to accept numeric items with underscores as that might impact all kinds of places. Can I suggest a workaround that allows you to enter your integer (or floating point which gets truncated) using this: underint <- function(text) as.integer(gsub("_+", "", text)) Use a call to that anywhere you want an int like: result <- underint("1_000_000") + underint("6___6__6_6") - 6000 results in: 100666 If you want to see the result with underscores, using something like scales::comma as in You can also make similar functions that use as.numeric() and as.double() but note that this allows you to enter data at somewhat greater expense and as text/strings. Obviously a similar technique can be used with regular expressions of many kinds to wipe out or replace anything, including commas with this: undernumeric <- function(text) as.numeric(gsub("[,_]+", "", text)) undernumeric("123,456.789_012") [1] 123456.8 Yes, it truncated it but I am sure any combo of underscores and commas will be removed. It also truncates the same thing with all numerals and a period. -----Original Message----- From: R-devel <r-devel-bounces at r-project.org> On Behalf Of Devin Marlin Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2022 3:54 PM To: r-devel at r-project.org Subject: [Rd] Feature Request: Allow Underscore Separated Numbers Hello, After using R for a number of years, and venturing into other languages, I've noticed the ones with the ability to enter numbers separated by underscores for readability (like 100000 as 100_000) make life a whole lot easier, especially when debugging. Is this a feature that could be implemented in R? Regards, -- *Devin Marlin* [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
Duncan Murdoch
2022-Jul-15 10:01 UTC
[Rd] Feature Request: Allow Underscore Separated Numbers
On 14/07/2022 3:53 p.m., Devin Marlin wrote:> Hello, > > After using R for a number of years, and venturing into other languages, > I've noticed the ones with the ability to enter numbers separated by > underscores for readability (like 100000 as 100_000) make life a whole lot > easier, especially when debugging. Is this a feature that could be > implemented in R?I think this could be done, but I doubt if anyone who could make the change would think the arbitrary decisions and added complexity in the parser was worth the effort. (Would it be a thousands separator, or could it separate any number of digits? Could a number start with an underscore or end with one?) Instead, I'd suggest creating variables with meaningful names to hold big numeric constants, e.g. AU_in_km <- 149598262 # or 149.598262e6 Jupiter <- 5.2 * AU_in_km rather than Jupiter <- 5.2 * 149_598_262 Duncan Murdoch