Printing integers in R "as is"

I am using the following command to print to a file (I omitted the file
details):

cat( paste( paste(orientation, start, end, names,"\n"), paste(start, end,
"exon\n"), sep=""))

where "orientation" and "names" are character vectors and "start" and
"end" are integer vectors.

For printing formatted output of this kind, you're generally much better
off using sprintf, as in

    cat(sprintf("%2s  %8d  %8d  %s\n", orientation, as.integer(start), as.integer(end), names));

or, if length(names) > 1, you might consider

    sprintf("%2s  %8d  %8d  %s\n", orientation, as.integer(start), as.integer(end), paste(names, collapse = ", "));

etc. This assumes that start and end are numeric vectors of length 1,
which seems sensible to me based on the context I can conclude from the
variable names, and I think that sprintf in R-devel, and R 2.1.0 in the
near future will cycle over longer vectors too.

The problem is that R coerce the integer vectors to characters. In
general, that works fine, but when one of the integer is 100000 (or has
more 0's) then R prints it as 1e+05. This behavior causes a lot of
trouble for the program reading R's output.
This problem occur with paste, cat,
and print (i.e. paste(100000)="1e+05" and so on).

Are you certain that start and end are integer vectors? If in doubt,
check typeof(start) -- the fact that the values are integer does not
necessarily mean that the type is integer.

Best regards, Jan

+- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+
 |    *NEW*    email: jtk at cmp.uea.ac.uk                               |
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