pad numeric column with leading zeros

Question

I\'ve been looking into this for the past few hours. I have tried using sprintf but it changes the column to character. All I want to do is to have a fixed-widt

Answer 1

If you give more context we might be able to help you solve your ultimate (rather than proximal) problem, e.g. if you need output in this format but without quotation marks:

> cat(sprintf("%04d",5),"\n")
0005 
## or
> print(sprintf("%04d",5),quote=FALSE)
[1] 0005

write.csv(...,quote=FALSE) might be helpful too