How to format a number as percentage in R

Question

One of the things that used to perplex me as a newby to R was how to format a number as a percentage for printing   For example  display 0 12345 as 12 345    I have a number of workarounds for this  but none of these seem to be  newby friendly    For example   set seed 1  m  lt - runif 5   paste round 100 m  2        sep      1   26 55    37 21    57 29    90 82    20 17    sprintf   1 2f     100 m   1   26 55    37 21    57 29    90 82    20 17     Question  Is there a base R function to do this   Alternatively  is there a widely used package that provides a convenient wrapper     Despite searching for something like this in  format   formatC and  prettyNum  I have yet to find a suitably convenient wrapper in base R      percent  didn t yield anything useful   library sos   findFn  format percent   returns 1250 hits - so again not useful   ggplot2 has a function percent but this gives no control over rounding accuracy

User · Answer

Check out the percent function from the formattable package   library formattable  x  lt - c 0 23  0 95  0 3  percent x   1  23 00  95 00  30 00

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This function could transform the data to percentages by columns  percent colmns   function base  columnas   1 ncol base   filas   1 nrow base        base2   base     for j in columnas           suma c   sum base  j           for i in filas               base2 i j    base i j  100 suma c                     return base2

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You can use the scales package just for this operation  without loading it with require or library   scales  percent m

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Even later   As pointed out by  DzimitryM  percent   has been  retired  in favor of label percent    which is a synonym for the old percent format   function   label percent   returns a function  so to use it  you need an extra pair of parentheses   library scales  x  lt - c -1  0  0 1  0 555555  1  100  label percent   x      1   -100      0         10        56        100       10 000     Customize this by adding arguments inside the first set of parentheses   label percent big mark        suffix     percent   x      1   -100 percent     0 percent        10 percent          4   56 percent       100 percent      10 000 percent      An update  several years later     These days there is a percent function in the scales package  as documented in krlmlr s answer   Use that instead of my hand-rolled solution     Try something like  percent  lt - function x  digits   2  format    f            paste0 formatC 100   x  format   format  digits   digits                 With usage  e g    x  lt - c -1  0  0 1  0 555555  1  100  percent x     If you prefer  change the format from  f  to  g

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Here s my solution for defining a new function  mostly so I can play around with Curry and Compose  -      library roxygen  printpct  lt - Compose function x  x 100  Curry sprintf fmt   1 2f

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Check out the scales package  It used to be a part of ggplot2  I think   library  scales   percent  1 10    100      1   1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9     10     The built-in logic for detecting the precision should work well enough for most cases   percent  1 10    1000      1   0 1    0 2    0 3    0 4    0 5    0 6    0 7    0 8    0 9    1 0   percent  1 10    100000      1   0 001    0 002    0 003    0 004    0 005    0 006    0 007    0 008       9   0 009    0 010   percent sqrt seq 0  1  by 0 1        1   0      32     45     55     63     71     77     84     89     95       11   100   percent seq 0  0 1  by 0 01     2      1   0 00    0 01    0 04    0 09    0 16    0 25    0 36    0 49    0 64      10   0 81    1 00

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Base R I much prefer to use sprintf which is available in base R  sprintf  quot  0 1f   quot    7293827   100   1   quot 72 9  quot   I especially like sprintf because you can also insert strings  sprintf  quot People who prefer  s over  s   0 4f   quot             quot Coke Classic quot             quot New Coke quot            999999   100   1   quot People who prefer Coke Classic over New Coke  99 9999  quot   It s especially useful to use sprintf with things like database configurations  you just read in a yaml file  then use sprintf to populate a template without a bunch of nasty paste0 s  Longer motivating example This pattern is especially useful for rmarkdown reports  when you have a lot of text and a lot of values to aggregate  Setup   aggregation  library data table     for aggregate  approval  lt - data table year   trunc time presidents                            pct   as numeric presidents    100                         president   c rep  quot Truman quot   32                                        rep  quot Eisenhower quot   32                                        rep  quot Kennedy quot   12                                        rep  quot Johnson quot   20                                        rep  quot Nixon quot   24    approval agg  lt - approval i   TRUE                           j     ave approval   mean pct  na rm T                              by   president  approval agg       president ave approval   1      Truman    0 4700000   2  Eisenhower    0 6484375   3     Kennedy    0 7075000   4     Johnson    0 5550000   5       Nixon    0 4859091  Using sprintf with vectors of text and numbers  outputting to cat just for newlines  approval agg   sprintf  quot  s approval rating   0 1f   quot                          president                         ave approval   100     gt      cat    sep    quot  n quot        Truman approval rating  47 0    Eisenhower approval rating  64 8    Kennedy approval rating  70 8    Johnson approval rating  55 5    Nixon approval rating  48 6   Finally  for my own selfish reference  since we re talking about formatting  this is how I do commas with base R  30298 78   gt   round   gt   prettyNum big mark    quot   quot    1   quot 30 299 quot

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I did some benchmarking for speed on these answers and was surprised to see percent in the scales package so touted  given its sluggishness  I imagine the advantage is its automatic detector for for proper formatting  but if you know what your data looks like it seems clear to be avoided   Here are the results from trying to format a list of 100 000 percentages in  0 1  to a percentage in 2 digits   library microbenchmark  x   runif 1e5  microbenchmark times   100L  andrie1    andrie2    richie    krlmlr      Unit  milliseconds     expr       min        lq      mean    median        uq       max   1 andrie1    91 08811  95 51952  99 54368  97 39548 102 75665 126 54918  paste round      2 andrie2    43 75678  45 56284  49 20919  47 42042  51 23483  69 10444  sprintf     3  richie    79 35606  82 30379  87 29905  84 47743  90 38425 112 22889  paste formatC      4  krlmlr   243 19699 267 74435 304 16202 280 28878 311 41978 534 55904  scales  percent     So sprintf emerges as a clear winner when we want to add a percent sign  On the other hand  if we only want to multiply the number and round  go from proportion to percent without      then round   is fastest     Unit  milliseconds          expr      min        lq      mean    median        uq       max   1 andrie1    4 43576  4 514349  4 583014  4 547911  4 640199  4 939159   round     2 andrie2   42 26545 42 462963 43 229595 42 960719 43 642912 47 344517   sprintf     3  richie   64 99420 65 872592 67 480730 66 731730 67 950658 96 722691   formatC

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The tidyverse version is this   gt  library dplyr   gt  library scales    gt  set seed 1   gt  m  lt - runif 5   gt  dt  lt - as data frame m    gt  dt   gt   mutate perc percent m accuracy 0 001             m    perc 1 0 2655087 26 551  2 0 3721239 37 212  3 0 5728534 57 285  4 0 9082078 90 821  5 0 2016819 20 168   Looks tidy as usual

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try this   data format  lt - function data digit 2 type       if type   d         type    f       digit   0    switch type             format  lt - paste       digit   f    type  sep     num  lt - 100        f     format  lt - paste       digit  type  sep     num  lt - 1       cat type   is not a recognized type n     sprintf format  num   data

[r] How to format a number as percentage in R?

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