Assigning a function to the 'times' argument of rep() - R-help

z2.0

Sun, Feb 12, 2012 7:56 PM #

Question: 

I'm trying to use paste() with rep() to reformat a series of values as zip
codes. e.g., if column 1 looks like:

52775
83111
99240
4289
112
57701
20001

I want rows 4 and 5 to read,

"04289"
"00112"

My thought was this:

paste(rep("0",times=(5-nchar(as.character(perry_frame$zip)))),perry_frame$zip,sep=''),
  as.character(perry_frame$zip))

But R throws the following:

Error in rep("0", times = (5 - nchar(as.character(perry_frame$zip)))) : 
  invalid 'times' argument

Is there a reason this doesn't work?

Thanks,

Zack

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Berend Hasselman

Sun, Feb 12, 2012 9:37 PM #

On 13-02-2012, at 04:56, z2.0 wrote:

This might help

x <- c(52775, 83111, 99240, 4289, 112, 57701, 20001)

[1] "52775" "83111" "99240" "04289" "00112" "57701" "20001"

Berend

Jorge I Velez

Sun, Feb 12, 2012 9:40 PM #

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Berend Hasselman

Sun, Feb 12, 2012 9:45 PM #

On 13-02-2012, at 06:37, Berend Hasselman wrote:

or

sprintf("%05d", x)

Berend

Petr Savicky

Mon, Feb 13, 2012 12:24 AM #

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 07:56:48PM -0800, z2.0 wrote:

Hi.

Working solutions were suggested by others. The answer
to your question is that "times" argument should either
be a single number or a vector of the same length as the
first argument. However,

  "0" has length 1

  5 - nchar(as.character(perry_frame$zip))
  [1] 0 0 0 1 2 0 0

Hope this helps.

Petr Savicky.