Question

What’s the best way to format a numeric so that it does NOT show leading zero. For example:

test = .006
sprintf/format/formatC( ??? )  # should result in ".006"

Answer 1

You can always fix it up yourself with regular expression search-and-replace:

library(stringr)
test = .006
str_replace(as.character(test), "^0\\.", ".")

Not the most elegant answer, but it works. Substitute whatever string conversion you like for as.character, such as sprintf with your preferred floating point format.