[R-SIG-Mac] Unexpected behavior from sprintf()

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 12-04-24 4:24 PM, Joran Elias wrote:
> I stumbled across this by accident from this StackOverflow question:
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/q/10300325/324364
>
> and a subsequent discussion in the StackOverflow R chat room:
>
> http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/3431991#3431991
>
> The issue is the output from the following code:
>
> sprintf('%05s',as.character(1:5))
>
> It appears that when this is run in OS X in either 2.14.2 or 2.15.0, the
> output is:
>
> [1] "00001" "00002" "00003" "00004" "00005"
>
> whereas when it is run on other platforms (I saw examples from various
> Windows versions and one user on Ubuntu, all using 2.15.0 I believe) you
> get:
>
> [1] "    1" "    2" "    3" "    4" "    5"
>
> There was some uncertainty as to which behavior is "expected". Does anyone
> have any insight into which behavior is "correct" and whether this is a bug
> or not?

I would say it's probably user-error:  the docs don't say what that 
should do.   Numeric formats would pad with zeros, but I don't think it 
says what would happen if you ask for zero padding on a string.

In any case, R just passes a format like that to the C printf function. 
  So if it's a bug, it's in the C run-time, not in R.

Duncan

>
> - Joran
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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