format(numericmatrix, ...) : proposal for a change
Martin Maechler
Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch>
Fri, 25 Sep 1998 17:21:22 +0200
Since format, i.e., format.default(.), is a pretty basic function I
thought I'd ask before just changing it...
aa <- cbind(1:7, rnorm(7))
format(aa)
or
format(aa, digits=7)
looks like
[,1] [,2]
[1,] " 1.0000000" " 0.2406669"
[2,] " 2.0000000" "-0.4973221"
[3,] " 3.0000000" " 0.4672260"
[4,] " 4.0000000" " 0.4794697"
[5,] " 5.0000000" "-1.0234062"
[6,] " 6.0000000" "-0.3430790"
[7,] " 7.0000000" "-0.1847634"
which is pretty ugly.
What I'd rather want is that each column be formatted independently, i.e.,
(almost) the result I'd currently get from
apply(aa, 2, format, digits=7)
---
S gives something like
S> format(aa, digits=7)
[,1] [,2]
[1,] " 1 " " 0.07364329 "
[2,] " 2 " "-0.7101905 "
[3,] " 3 " " 0.005834993"
[4,] " 4 " " 0.3425964 "
[5,] " 5 " " 0.8825893 "
[6,] " 6 " " 0.9540261 "
[7,] " 7 " "-0.4660654 "
(which is different from the above apply(...) by using strings which all
have the identical number of characters).
Proposal: I'd like to have format(<numeric matrix>, ...) change to do
COLUMNWISE formatting, either the way as apply(..) above, or
returning strings of identical length (somewhat like S above).
Note I don't intend to copy S-plus' ``full mess'' of doing it :
In S-plus
format(aa)
and format(aa, digits = .Options$digits)
are very different even though .Options$digits *IS* the default for
digits...
Also, we have formatC(.) which very useful for quite a few problems...
---------------
What do we ( you !) want ?
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