Aug 312009

Yanping Chen raised a question in the Chinese COS forum on the output of Eviews: how to (re)format the decimal coefficients in equations as text output? For example, we want to round the numbers in CC = 16.5547557654 + 0.0173022117998*PP + 0.216234040485 * PP(-1) + 0.810182697599 * (WP + WG) to the 3rd decimal places. This can be simply done by regular expressions, as decimals always begin with a “.”. The basic steps are:

  1. find out where are the decimals in the character string;
  2. format them;
  3. replace the original decimals with formatted values;

Given a character vector, we can format the decimals with the code below:

WWW.YIHUI.NAME XIE@YIHUI.NAME © 2007 - 2010 by Yihui Xie