how to return number of decimal places in R

Question

I am working in R. I have a series of coordinates in decimal degrees, and I would like to sort these coordinates by how many decimal places these numbers have (i.e. I will w

Answer 1

Rollowing up on Roman's suggestion:

num.decimals <- function(x) {
    stopifnot(class(x)=="numeric")
    x <- sub("0+$","",x)
    x <- sub("^.+[.]","",x)
    nchar(x)
}
x <- "5.2300000"
num.decimals(x)

If your data isn't guaranteed to be of the proper form, you should do more checking to ensure other characters aren't sneaking in.