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I'm currently using printCoefmat to print a matrix out and want to apply some formatting to the numbers.
I want to force scientific notation when the numbers have an exponent greater than 3.
I can't quite figure out how scipen works, Does anyone have any idea how I can do this?
882
In order to eliminate the exponential notation of the integer, we can use the global setting using options() method, by setting the scipen argument, that is options(scipen = n). Scipen: A penalty to be applied when deciding to print numeric values in fixed or exponential notation.
The value of scipen is the number of orders of ten smaller (i.e. decimal places preceded by 0's) required to switch to scientific notation. Decreasing the value of scipen will cause R to switch to scientific location for larger numbers.
A number is written in scientific notation when a number between 1 and 10 is multiplied by a power of 10. For example, 650,000,000 can be written in scientific notation as 6.5 ✕ 10^8.
Just type in a big number to get R to display unscientific notation.
options( scipen = 20 )
If that's not enough, make the number bigger...
It is confusing, but the penalty is applied to the scientific notation version, as in R looks at how many characters it takes to print a particular string. It adds the value scipen penalty to the number of characters in scientific notation and if it is still less than the number of characters required to print the actual number then it will print scientific and vice versa. I hope this example will illustrate the point:
options( scipen = 0 )
options( digits = 6 )
>1e5
#[1] 1e+05 ----> 5 characters in scientific, vs. 6 for '100000' in normal
>1e4
#[1] 10000 ----> 5 characters in normal, vs. 5 for '1e+04' in scientific
options(scipen = 1 )
>1e5
#[1] 100000 ----> 6 characters in normal, vs. 5 + 1 for '1e+05' + scipen penalty in scientific
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