Padding and Reducing Characters

Question

I am very new to R. I have a numeric vector, let's say data <- c(1,3, 5, 10, 101). What I need is to have every element as a character, add a zero to single digits, and not have more than two characters in every element. I am using the following code:

pad <- str_pad(data, width = 2, side = "left", pad="0")

But this still does not reduce "101" to "10". Any suggestions?

This is different from an earlier thread on padding which does not provide me an answer to how to reduce "101" to "10"

`str_pad` is not a base R function. Please include the names of the relevant packages that you are using. — lmo, Feb 06 '17 at 20:02
Possible duplicate of [Adding leading zeros using R](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5812493/adding-leading-zeros-using-r) — lmo, Feb 06 '17 at 20:03
I referred to "Adding leading zeros using R ". But I couldn't find the answer to reducing 3 digit characters to two digits. The code I have written is from that thread itself. — shashank rai, Feb 06 '17 at 20:06
Not sure why you'd want to do this, but wrap the result in `substr`: `substr(str_pad(data, width = 2, side = "left", pad="0"), 1, 2)`. — lmo, Feb 06 '17 at 20:11

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 06 '17 at 20:11

2

library(stringr)

data <- c(1,3, 5, 10, 101)
data <- as.character(data)
data <- strtrim(data, 2)
data <- str_pad(data, width = 2, side = "left", pad = "0")
data
# [1] "01" "03" "05" "10" "10"

I split up the steps but you could easily nest some of those steps as well.

answered Feb 06 '17 at 20:11

MeetMrMet

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Thanks Craig. That does it! – shashank rai Feb 06 '17 at 20:16

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 06 '17 at 20:21

Here's a function that would do what you want

str_pad = function(data){    
     data = ifelse(abs(data)<10,
                         paste("0", data,sep = ""),
                         ifelse(abs(data)>100,
                                substr(as.character(data),1,2),
                                as.character(data))) 
    return(data)
}

Padding and Reducing Characters

2 Answers2