padW0 function

Pad with 0's.

Sometimes we receive this c(1, 22, 131) and we need character variables of the same size, such as c("001", "022", "131"). This happens if a user has mistakenly converted a zip code (US regional identifier) like "00231" to a number. This function converts the number back to a 0 padded string.

padW0(x)

Arguments

• x: a numeric variable.

Returns

A character string vector padded with 0's

Details

This works differently if the number provided is an integer, or a character string. Integers are left padded with the character "0". A character string will be left-padded with blanks.

Examples

x <- c(1 , 11, 22, 121, 14141, 31)
(xpad <- padW0(x))
x <- rpois(7, lambda = 11)
(xpad <- padW0(x))
x <- c("Alabama", "Iowa", "Washington")

Author(s)

Paul Johnson pauljohn@ku.edu