How can I paste 100000 without it being shortened to 1e+05? [duplicate]

Question

Question: How can I use paste without 100000 becoming 1e+05?

Sorry in advance if this question seems frivolous (but it has resulted in a bug in my code). I use R to call an external script, so when I say e.g. paste("abc",100000) I want it to output "abc 100000" and not "abc 1e+05".

Here's an example of what it looks like on my screen:

> paste("abc",100000) [1] "abc 1e+05" > paste("abc",100001) [1] "abc 100001" 

This results in the bizarre behaviour that my script works for the input "100001" but not "100000".

I realise I could create a script to convert numbers to strings however I like, but I feel I shouldn't do this if there is an internal way to do the same thing (I suspect there is some "method" I'm missing).

[If it helps, I'm on Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS ("precise"), running R version 2.14.1 (2011-12-22) in a terminal.]

Answer 1

See ?options, particularly scipen:

R> paste("abc", 100000) [1] "abc 1e+05" R> options("scipen"=10)    # set high penalty for scientific display R> paste("abc", 100000) [1] "abc 100000" R>  

Alternatively, control formatting tightly the old-school way via sprintf():

R> sprintf("%s %6d", "abc", 100000) [1] "abc 100000" R>  

Answer 2

Alternatively, you can use integers which don't get printed in scientific notation. You can specify that your number is an integer by putting an "L" behind it, or doing as.integer.

> paste("abc",100000L) [1] "abc 100000" > paste("abc",as.integer(1000000000)) [1] "abc 1000000000"