[Rd] (PR#8337) formatC adds leading space -- on some Windoze

[maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch]

>>>>> "KevinW" == Kevin Wright <kwright68 at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Mon, 21 Nov 2005 18:13:36 +0100 (CET) writes:

    KevinW> Full_Name: Kevin Wright
    KevinW> Version: 2.2.0
    KevinW> OS: Windows 2000
	        ^^^^^^^
this must be part of the problem


    KevinW> Submission from: (NULL) (170.54.58.4)



    KevinW> Apologies if my expectations (or reading of the man page) are incorrect.  

    KevinW> I seem unable to left-justify exponential format
    KevinW> numbers.  There appears to always be an extra space
    KevinW> inserted to the left.

    KevinW> Using the example from the formatC help page:

    R> xx  <- pi * 10^(-5:4)

    R> cbind(formatC(xx, wid = 9, flag = "-"))
    KevinW>      [,1]        
    KevinW> [1,] " 3.142e-05"
    KevinW> [2,] "0.0003142" 
    KevinW> [3,] "0.003142 " 
    KevinW> [4,] "0.03142  " 
    KevinW> [5,] "0.3142   " 
    KevinW> [6,] "3.142    " 
    KevinW> [7,] "31.42    " 
    KevinW> [8,] "314.2    " 
    KevinW> [9,] "3142     " 
    KevinW> [10,] " 3.142e+04"

which is also not obeying the 'wid' argument.

I get something much more reasonable:

      [,1]       
 [1,] "3.142e-05"
 [2,] "0.0003142"
 [3,] "0.003142 "
 [4,] "0.03142  "
 [5,] "0.3142   "
 [6,] "3.142    "
 [7,] "31.42    "
 [8,] "314.2    "
 [9,] "3142     "
[10,] "3.142e+04"

formatC uses your system's C library printf {that's where the
"C" comes from in 'formatC'} which seems to be
broken or at least not performing as we think it should.

On a "Windows 2003 Server" I have access to, I see the same
wrong behavior as above.

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich