Unexpected behavior from sprintf()

On 12-04-24 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". Does  
anyone
have any insight into which behavior is "correct" and whether this  
is a bug
or not?

I would say it's probably user-error:  the docs don't say what that  
should do.   Numeric formats would pad with zeros, but I don't think  
it says what would happen if you ask for zero padding on a string.