leading_zero: Function to add leading zeroes to maintain fixed width.

In eeptools: Convenience Functions for Education Data

Function to add leading zeroes to maintain fixed width.

Description

This function ensures that fixed width data is the right length by padding zeroes to the front of values. This is a common problem with fixed width data after importing into R as non-character type.

Usage

leading_zero(x, digits = 2)

Arguments

x	a vector of numeric data that should be fixed width but is missing leading zeroes.
digits	an integer representing the desired width of x

Details

If x contains negative values, digits is widened by 1 for the entire vector so that all values share a uniform total width, with the negative sign occupying one character position. For example, leading_zero(c(-5, 42), digits = 2) returns c("-05", "042") — both width 3. Mixed-sign vectors are supported but produce width digits + 1 for all elements.

Value

A character vector of length digits

Author(s)

Jason P. Becker

Jared E. Knowles

Examples

a <- seq(1,10)
a <- leading_zero(a, digits = 3)
a

eeptools documentation built on June 23, 2026, 1:06 a.m.