R help - Aug 2003 - Printing linefeeds using sprintf

Is there a way to print complex, multi-line text and numeric output with
good control of the field width and precision of numeric values?  In the
first example in the R Documentation for the sprintf function, there appears
to be a linefeed code "\n", but it is printed literally.
> sprintf("%s is %f feet tall\n", "Sven", 7)
[1] "Sven is 7.000000 feet tall\n"

Thanks,

O. Maurice Haynes
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Child and Family Research Section
6705 Rockledge Drive
Bethesda, MD  20892
Voice: 301-496-8180
Fax: 301-496-2766
E-Mail: mh192j at nih.gov

> Is there a way to print complex, multi-line text and numeric output 
> with
> good control of the field width and precision of numeric values?  In 
> the
> first example in the R Documentation for the sprintf function, there 
> appears
> to be a linefeed code "\n", but it is printed literally.
>
>> sprintf("%s is %f feet tall\n", "Sven", 7)
> [1] "Sven is 7.000000 feet tall\n"
That is because the output of sprintf is the _string_ that sprintf 
returns. You could cat this string to get the behavior you probably 
expected:

 > cat(sprintcat(sprintf("%s is %f feet tall\n\nNew line\n",
"Sven", 7))
Sven is 7.000000 feet tall

New line
 >

The following code defines a C-like "printf":

printf <- function(...) { cat(sprintf(...)) }

 > printf("%s is %f feet tall\n", "Sven", 7)
Sven is 7.000000 feet tall
 >

  - Hedderik.