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

Vector solution based on daroczig's function (can also deal with dirty columns containing strings and numerics):

decimalplaces_vec <- function(x) {

  vector <- c()
  for (i in 1:length(x)){

    if(!is.na(as.numeric(x[i]))){

      if ((as.numeric(x[i]) %% 1) != 0) {
        vector <- c(vector, nchar(strsplit(sub('0+$', '', as.character(x[i])), ".", fixed=TRUE)[[1]][[2]]))


      }else{
        vector <- c(vector, 0)
      }
    }else{
      vector <- c(vector, NA)
    }
  }
  return(max(vector))
}