Commas in formatC

"DavidB" == David Brahm <brahm@alum.mit.edu> writes:

    DavidB> formatC() is great for formatting numbers!  But it
    DavidB> would be even better if it could optionally insert
    DavidB> commas (or semicolons), e.g.

    R> formatC(1234567.89, digits=2, format="f", commas=T)
    DavidB> [1] "1,234,567.89"

    DavidB> Here's a snippet of code that does that, which could
    DavidB> more or less just be inserted into at the end of
    DavidB> formatC if any R-core guru were so inclined.  "r" is
    DavidB> the result so far, and "commas" is a logical flag:

    DavidB> stp <- regexpr("[0-9]+", r);  len <- attr(stp, "match.length")
    DavidB> if (commas && (maxl <- max(len)) > 3) for (i in seq(3, maxl-1, 3))
    DavidB> r[len>i] <- paste(substring(r[len>i], 1, (stp+len-1-i)[len>i]),
    DavidB> substring(r[len>i], (stp+len-i)[len>i]), sep=",")

Thank you, David, for the suggestion.

I'm looking at adding something quite a bit more general
to both format.default() and formatC(), using a new function
prettyNum() and using new arguments (that are compatible to S-plus'
format.default).