Change Number of Decimal Places in R (2 Examples)

The following R code shows how to format the number of decimal places displayed in the RStudio console of the R programming language.

Example Data

my_number <- 10.7465284658                  # Create example number
my_number
# 10.74653

As you can see based on the output of the RStudio console, the default number of displayed digits is 7 (i.e. 2 digits before and 5 digits after the comma).

Format Decimal Places with format & round Functions

We can return a number with only 2 decimal places with a combination of the format and round functions:

format(round(my_number, 2), nsmall = 2)     # Apply format function
# "10.75"

Note that this output is a character string and not a numeric anymore.

Format Number of Digits in Global Options

We can also change the global options in our R installation:

options(digits = 7)                         # Modify global options
my_number
# 10.75

Note that this is formatting the number of digits, not the number of decimal places.