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?

x <- 1.128347132904321674821 

EDIT:

The use of:

options(digits=2) 

Has been suggested as a possible answer. Is there a way to specify this within a script for one-time use? When I add it to my script it doesn't seem to do anything different and I'm not interested in a lot of re-typing to format each number (I'm automating a very large report).

--

Answer: round(x, digits=2)

Answer 1

Background: Some answers suggested on this page (e.g., signif, options(digits=...)) do not guarantee that a certain number of decimals are displayed for an arbitrary number. I presume this is a design feature in R whereby good scientific practice involves showing a certain number of digits based on principles of "significant figures". However, in many domains (e.g., APA style, business reports) formatting requirements dictate that a certain number of decimal places are displayed. This is often done for consistency and standardisation purposes rather than being concerned with significant figures.

Solution:

The following code shows exactly two decimal places for the number x.

format(round(x, 2), nsmall = 2) 

For example:

format(round(1.20, 2), nsmall = 2) # [1] "1.20" format(round(1, 2), nsmall = 2) # [1] "1.00" format(round(1.1234, 2), nsmall = 2) # [1] "1.12" 

A more general function is as follows where x is the number and k is the number of decimals to show. trimws removes any leading white space which can be useful if you have a vector of numbers.

specify_decimal <- function(x, k) trimws(format(round(x, k), nsmall=k)) 

E.g.,

specify_decimal(1234, 5) # [1] "1234.00000" specify_decimal(0.1234, 5) # [1] "0.12340" 

Discussion of alternatives:

The formatC answers and sprintf answers work fairly well. But they will show negative zeros in some cases which may be unwanted. I.e.,

formatC(c(-0.001), digits = 2, format = "f") # [1] "-0.00" sprintf(-0.001, fmt = '%#.2f') # [1] "-0.00" 

One possible workaround to this is as follows:

formatC(as.numeric(as.character(round(-.001, 2))), digits = 2, format = "f") # [1] "0.00"