R help - Jul 2003 - printf and friends in R?

Hi folks

Does R have anything straightforwardly resembling the commands
fprintf, sprintf, printf (derived from C, and present in octave
and matlab)?

As in   printf(format_string, ... )
where "format_string" defines the print format (including any
fixed text) and "..." is a list of variables whose values are
to be inserted into the line.

Example:

  printf("Case %d#%.2f#%.2f%.4f\n", n,x1,x2,x3 )

which would output a line like

  Case 10#3.21#7.65#0.4321

this particular case being a line in the right format for processing
by groff's 'tbl' table-formatter. In fact you could write the whole
table definition using printf:

  printf(".TS\ntab(#);\nr n n n.\n"
  for(i in (1:nrow(X))){
    printf("Case %d#%.2f#%.2f%.4f\n", n,X[i,1],X[i,2],X[i,3] )
  }
  printf(".TE\n")

Other variants could be used for similar purposes.

(If something like this is not already around in R, I suppose it
wouldn't be too difficult for me to write it; but it's worth asking
first!)

Thanks,
Ted.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972
Date: 15-Jul-03                                       Time: 11:32:39
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(Ted Harding) wrote:

help.search("printf") reveals the sprintf function (amongst others).
> Example:
> 
>   printf("Case %d#%.2f#%.2f%.4f\n", n,x1,x2,x3 )
> 
> which would output a line like
> 
>   Case 10#3.21#7.65#0.4321
 > sprintf("Case %d#%.2f#%.2f%.4f\n", as.integer(n),x1,x2,x3 )
[1] "Case 10#3.21#7.650.4321\n"

  Note it returns a formatted string, which you can then print or cat if 
you want it output to screen. If you cat it then the \n will be a 
carriage return.


Baz

On 15-Jul-03 Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> help.search("printf") reveals the sprintf function (amongst
others).
Thanks! (For some reason this drew a blank when I tried it before ... ).

All best wishes,
Ted.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972
Date: 15-Jul-03                                       Time: 13:34:54
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