[R] pad leading zeros in front of strings

[Hui Du]

Thanks all. I am trying to cleaning up user-inputted zip code. Most of them are pure numeric values but someone put characters in zipcode field, so I have to treat that field as a string rather than number.

HXD

-----Original Message-----
From: R. Michael Weylandt [mailto:michael.weylandt at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2012 12:00 PM
To: Sarah Goslee
Cc: Hui Du; r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] pad leading zeros in front of strings

I get "00123"  and "00abc" respectively. Agreed it's perhaps odd, but
c'est la OS.

M

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:57 PM, Sarah Goslee <sarah.goslee at gmail.com> wrote:
> Michael, I'm curious: if you pass sprintf() a string, it still pads
> with zeros? What's the output of:
>
> sprintf("%05s", "123")
> sprintf("%05s", "abc")
>
> On linux, sprintf() pads strings with spaces, as you'd expect. Padding
> strings with zeros is... odd.
>
> Sarah
>
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.15.0 (2012-03-30)
> Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)
>
> locale:
>  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
>  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
>  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
>  [7] LC_PAPER=C                 LC_NAME=C
>  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
> [1] tools_2.15.0
>
> On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:49 PM, R. Michael Weylandt
> <michael.weylandt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think once upon a time this was found to be OS-dependent since it
>> calls the system's C  sprintf()  -- I get the leading zeros on Mac. I
>> presume you're on Windows?
>>
>> Michael
>>
>> On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Hui Du <Hui.Du at dataventures.com> wrote:
>>> Dear All,
>>>
>>> This question sounds very simple but I don't know where I am wrong. I just want to pad leading zeros in some string, for example, "123" becomes "00123". What is wrong if I do following?
>>>
>>>> sprintf("%05s", "123")
>>> [1] "  123"
>>>
>>>
>>> It didn't return "00123", instead it padded with 'blank'.
>>>
>>>
>>> Thank you for your help in advance.
>>>
>>> HXD
>>>
>
> --
> Sarah Goslee
> http://www.functionaldiversity.org