Are you looking for how the floating point is represented in the IEEE-754
format?  If so, you can use writeBin:

> writeBin(pi,raw(),endian='big')
[1] 40 09 21 fb 54 44 2d 18


On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Ted Harding
<Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk>wrote:

> I am interested in studying the binary representation of numerics
> (doubles) in R, so am looking for possibilities of output of the
> internal binary representations. sprintf() with format "a" or "A"
> is halfway there:
>
>  sprintf("%A",pi)
> # [1] "0X1.921FB54442D18P+1"
>
> but it is in hex.
>
> The following illustrate the sort of thing I want:
>
> 1.1001 0010 0001 1111 1011 0101 0100 0100 0100 0010 1101 0001 1000
> times 2
>
> 11.0010 0100 0011 1111 0110 1010 1000 1000 1000 0101 1010 0011 000
>
> 0.1100 1001 0000 1111 1101 1010 1010 0010 0010 0001 0110 1000 1100 0
> times 4
>
> (without the spaces -- only put in above for clarity).
>
> While I could take the original output "0X1.921FB54442D18P+1" from
> sprintf() and parse it out into binary using gsub() or the like,
> of submit it to say an 'awk' script via an external file, this would
> be a tedious business!
>
> Is there some function already in R which outputs the bits in the
> binary representation directly?
>
> I see that Dabid Hinds asked a similar question on 17 Aug 2005:
> "Raw data type transformations"
>
>  http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02/archive/59900.html
>
> (without, apparently, getting any response -- at any rate within
> the following 3 months).
>
> With thanks for any suggestions,
> Ted.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk>
> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
> Date: 17-May-09                                       Time: 18:23:49
> ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
>
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>



-- 
Jim Holtman
Cincinnati, OH
+1 513 646 9390

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?

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