Formatting Currencies in R

Here are a few ways to format numbers in R for presentations. A few of theme can be accomplished using the paste function in R. I’ve found that there are a few different methods to do this.

Using the scales package

Using the scales packages from Hadley, there is a great function with various options including passing a vector.

	library(scales)
	dollar_format()(c(-100, 0.23, 1.456565, 2e3))

Formatting currency with separator

Following is a simple function one can build and place in their utility function that will give formatted currency.

myNum = 1234.12 
toCurrency <- function(money)
{
	paste("$",format(money, big.mark=","),sep="")
}
toCurrency(myNum)