On Wed, Jan 05, 2011 at 03:50:13PM +0000, jose Bartolomei wrote: [...] > > I was thinking to create a character vector of 0's 9-nchar(xx). > Then paste it to xx. > 9-nchar(xx) > [1] 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 > [38] 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 6 6 6 6 6 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 > [75] 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 ......1 > > > > > Nevertheless, I have not been able to create this vector nor I do not know if > this is the best option.
Did you consider something like the following? xx <- c("abc", "abcd", "abcde") z1 <- rep("000000000", times=length(xx)) z2 <- substr(z1, 1, 9 - nchar(xx)) yy <- paste(z2, xx, sep="") cbind(yy) # yy #[1,] "000000abc" #[2,] "00000abcd" #[3,] "0000abcde" Petr Savicky. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.