A version of as.character that does not round integers

Question

base::as.character() rounds integers with decimal places:

>as.character(5.00)
>"5"

So the two zeros after the decimal place are lost, whereas

>as.character(5.01)
>"5.01"

Keeps the two numbers. Although I can understand whilst dropping the zeros is sensible, I'm interested in where unnecessary digits have been used, so I'd like to keep everything. What I really want is something like:

>as.character.f(c(5, 5.0, 5.00))
>"5"  "5.0"  "5.00" 

Answer 1

I guess you could use more of a for-loop to be able to reproduce what you want:

mapply(format,c(5,5.0,5.00),nsmall=c(0,1,2))
[1] "5"   "5.0"  "5.00"