On 10 Apr 2008, at 12:33, Stanley Ng wrote: > How can I use formatC to convert 6000000 to 6e5 and not 6e+05 ? > >> formatC(600000) > [1] "6e+05" >> formatC(600000, format="e", digit=0) > [1] "6e+05" Try this: gsub("([eE])(\\+?)(\\-?)0+", "\\1\\3", formatC(600000, format="e", digit=0)) --Hans