Pad with leading zeros to common width [duplicate]

Solution 1:

Simply following the advise in @joran's comment,

DB <- data.frame(
HOUR  = c(1, 10, 5, 20),
ID  = c(2, 4, 6, 6))

NHOUR <- sprintf("%02d",DB$HOUR) # fix to 2 characters 

cbind(NHOUR, DB) # combine old and newdata 
  NHOUR HOUR ID
1    01    1  2
2    10   10  4
3    05    5  6
4    20   20  6

Update 2013-01-21 23:42:00Z Inspired by daroczig's performance test below, and because I wanted to try out the microbenchmark package, I've updated this question with a small performance test of my own comparing the three different solutions suggested in this thread.

# install.packages(c("microbenchmark", "stringr"), dependencies = TRUE)
require(microbenchmark)
require(stringr)

SPRINTF <- function(x) sprintf("%02d", x)
FORMATC <- function(x) formatC(x, width = 2,flag = 0)
STR_PAD <- function(x) str_pad(x, width=2, side="left", pad="0")

x <- round(runif(1e5)*10)
res <- microbenchmark(SPRINTF(x), STR_PAD(x), FORMATC(x), times = 15)

## Print results:
print(res)
Unit: milliseconds
        expr       min        lq    median        uq      max
1 FORMATC(x) 623.53785 629.69005 638.78667 671.22769 679.8790
2 SPRINTF(x)  34.35783  34.81807  35.04618  35.53696  37.1622
3 STR_PAD(x) 116.54969 118.41944 118.97363 120.05729 163.9664

### Plot results:
boxplot(res)

Solution 2:

I like to use the stringr package:

DB$NHOUR <- str_pad(DB$HOUR, width=2, side="left", pad="0")