Ok, I guess that clears it up then. Thanks Ben and Simon for the explanation! I should have guessed that since it's "a wrapper for the system sprintf C-library function" discrepancies would be likely to simply be system dependent.
I saw that the R docs describe the 0 flag with the phrase 'For numbers...' but since it didn't actually say what would happen with non-numbers I wasn't entirely sure. It would be clearer (IMHO) if it said something explicit like "For characters, the behavior will be platform dependent.", I guess. - Joran On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Simon Urbanek <[email protected]>wrote: > > On Apr 24, 2012, at 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". > > The behavior of "%0s" is undefined -- this is documented both by R and > POSIX (arguably more clearly in the latter), so any behavior should be > expected. > > > > Does anyone > > have any insight into which behavior is "correct" and whether this is a > bug > > or not? > > > > It is not a bug. The formatting is done by the OS, so the results are > always OS-dependent -- since %0s is undefined, the OS can choose to > interpret it any way it wants. > > Cheers, > Simon > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
