Losing information after converting from character to numeric

Asked Apr 13 '16 at 07:42

Active Jun 10 '16 at 22:29

Viewed 101 times

I am facing a problem in converting long (19-digits) characters to numeric. After conversion they are transformed in an unpredictable manner. Why does the number change after 10th position in the character?

options(scipen=100000, digits=22)
a = '9440006300200000000'
class(a) 
[1] "character"
nchar(a) 
[1] 19
a_numeric = as.numeric(a)
a_numeric 
[1] 9440006300199999488
class(a_numeric)
[1] "numeric"
nchar(a_numeric)
[1] 19

edited Jun 10 '16 at 22:29

spazm

4,399
31
30

asked Apr 13 '16 at 07:42

statsprendimai

2

Possible duplicate of [Why are these numbers not equal?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9508518/why-are-these-numbers-not-equal) – jogo Apr 13 '16 at 07:48
1

If you want you can use bigint `library(gmp) a_numeric=as.bigz(a)` – Batanichek Apr 13 '16 at 07:54
Thanks Batanichek, as.bigZ solves the problem. – statsprendimai Apr 13 '16 at 08:23

Losing information after converting from character to numeric

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