On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Wolfgang Huber wrote:
Dear Prof. Ripley,
Would it be possible to make sprintf accept vector arguments? I.e. allow expressions like sprintf("%04d", 1:3) to produce something like what currently needs to be done via sapply(1:3, function(i) sprintf("%04d",i))
I have thought about this, but it is not really clear what the right thing would be here with multiple arguments. What should
sprintf(("%04d %s", 1:3, "abc")
do? Produce a character vector of length 1 or 3? If of length 1, "0001 0002 0003 abc" or "0001 2 0003 abc"?
I guess the most R-like thing would be to recycle args to the length of the longest and then use them in parallel, but that can be done fairly easily by *apply.
Personally, I would prefer the recycling, but of course it can be also done this way:
> mapply(sprintf, "%04d %s", 1:3, "abc") %04d %s <NA> <NA> "0001 abc" "0002 abc" "0003 abc"
the only slightly unaesthetic thing being the names of the resulting vector.
-- Best regards Wolfgang
------------------------------------- Wolfgang Huber European Bioinformatics Institute European Molecular Biology Laboratory Cambridge CB10 1SD England Phone: +44 1223 494642 Fax: +44 1223 494486 Http: www.ebi.ac.uk/huber
______________________________________________ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
