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

I have tested some solutions and I found this one robust to the bugs reported in the others.

countDecimalPlaces <- function(x) {
  if ((x %% 1) != 0) {
    strs <- strsplit(as.character(format(x, scientific = F)), "\\.")
    n <- nchar(strs[[1]][2])
  } else {
    n <- 0
  }
  return(n) 
}

# example to prove the function with some values
xs <- c(1000.0, 100.0, 10.0, 1.0, 0, 0.1, 0.01, 0.001, 0.0001)
sapply(xs, FUN = countDecimalPlaces)