[R] Lose of decimal when using write.table to text file

[Dieter Menne]

Bob Ly <robertly <at> vfemail.net> writes:

> I have the following:
>  >Date<-c("08/05/08","08/06/08","08/07/08")
>  >Weight<-c(209.4,211.8,210.0)
>  >planned.meal<-cbind(Date,Weight)
>  >planned.meal
>        Date    Weight
> 1  08/05/08,  209.4
> 2  08/06/08,  211.8
> 3  08/07/08,  210.0

This is strange. When I run your code, I get

> planned.meal 
     Date       Weight 
[1,] "08/05/08" "209.4"
[2,] "08/06/08" "211.8"
[3,] "08/07/08" "210"  

This could be a global date format setting, but it show part of the problem:
everything is converted to string as the common denominator.

Better use a data frame. And (from docs)

"For finer control, use format to make a character matrix/data frame, and call
write.table on that"

Dieter


Date<-c("08/05/08","08/06/08","08/07/08")
Weight<-c(209.4,211.8,210.0)
planned.meal<-cbind(Date,Weight)
planned.meal 

str(planned.meal)

planned.meal<-data.frame(Date=Date,Weight=Weight)
planned.meal 
str(planned.meal)

options(digits=1)
planned.meal.format =  format(planned.meal,nsmall=1)
planned.meal.format 

write.table(planned.meal.format, 
  file="plannedMeal1.txt", quote=FALSE, row.names=FALSE)