[R] Printing linefeeds using sprintf

[Hedderik van Rijn]

> Is there a way to print complex, multi-line text and numeric output 
> with
> good control of the field width and precision of numeric values?  In 
> the
> first example in the R Documentation for the sprintf function, there 
> appears
> to be a linefeed code "\n", but it is printed literally.
>
>> sprintf("%s is %f feet tall\n", "Sven", 7)
> [1] "Sven is 7.000000 feet tall\n"

That is because the output of sprintf is the _string_ that sprintf 
returns. You could cat this string to get the behavior you probably 
expected:

 > cat(sprintcat(sprintf("%s is %f feet tall\n\nNew line\n", "Sven", 7))
Sven is 7.000000 feet tall

New line
 >

The following code defines a C-like "printf":

printf <- function(...) { cat(sprintf(...)) }

 > printf("%s is %f feet tall\n", "Sven", 7)
Sven is 7.000000 feet tall
 >

  - Hedderik.