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

Don't mean to hijack the thread, just posting it here as it might help someone to deal with the task I tried to accomplish with the proposed code.

Unfortunately, even the updated @daroczig's solution didn't work for me to check if a number has less than 8 decimal digits.

@daroczig's code:

decimalplaces <- function(x) {
    if (abs(x - round(x)) > .Machine$double.eps^0.5) {
        nchar(strsplit(sub('0+$', '', as.character(x)), ".", fixed = TRUE)[[1]][[2]])
    } else {
        return(0)
    }
}

In my case produced the following results

NUMBER / NUMBER OF DECIMAL DIGITS AS PRODUCED BY THE CODE ABOVE
[1] "0.0000437 7"
[1] "0.000195 6"
[1] "0.00025 20"
[1] "0.000193 6"
[1] "0.000115 6"
[1] "0.00012501 8"
[1] "0.00012701 20"

etc.

So far was able to accomplish the required tests with the following clumsy code:

if (abs(x*10^8 - floor(as.numeric(as.character(x*10^8)))) > .Machine$double.eps*10^8) 
   {
   print("The number has more than 8 decimal digits")
   }

PS: I might be missing something in regard to not taking the root of the .Machine$double.eps so please take caution