Please do reply to the list -- I'm not on Windows so someone else will have to pick the question up to help you out.
It's not great, but you could do something like zeroPad <- function(str, len.out, num.zeros = len.out[1] - nchar(str)){ paste0(paste(rep("0", num.zeros), collapse = ""), str) } as a temporary work-around. Probably possible to vectorize that pretty easily as well. Best, Michael On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Hui Du <hui...@dataventures.com> wrote: > Thank you for your replay. Yes, I am on windows. > > Best Regards, > Hui Du > > Data Ventures Inc > > -----Original Message----- > From: R. Michael Weylandt [mailto:michael.weyla...@gmail.com] > Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2012 11:49 AM > To: Hui Du > Cc: r-help@r-project.org > Subject: Re: [R] pad leading zeros in front of strings > > I think once upon a time this was found to be OS-dependent since it > calls the system's C sprintf() -- I get the leading zeros on Mac. I > presume you're on Windows? > > Michael > > On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Hui Du <hui...@dataventures.com> wrote: >> Dear All, >> >> This question sounds very simple but I don't know where I am wrong. I just >> want to pad leading zeros in some string, for example, "123" becomes >> "00123". What is wrong if I do following? >> >>> sprintf("%05s", "123") >> [1] " 123" >> >> >> It didn't return "00123", instead it padded with 'blank'. >> >> >> Thank you for your help in advance. >> >> HXD >> >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] >> >> ______________________________________________ >> 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. ______________________________________________ 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.