How can I get format() to return a 1-character result?

Question

format(Sys.Date(),"%m") returns "07", but I'd like it to return "7" while still returning two characters when needed. adding width=8 to the argument list doesn't help, nor does anything else I've tried.

My end goal is to make the stock quote reading function on p. 182 of R in a Nutshell work properly.

Answer 1

Many ways to do it, but substr() might work best. Combine with ifelse() for two digits.

as.character(as.numeric(format(Sys.Date(),"%m")))

as.character(as.POSIXlt(Sys.Date())$mon + 1)

substr(format(Sys.Date(),"%m"), 2, 2)

Answer 2

You can use gsub to remove the leading zeros:

> gsub('^0','',format(Sys.Date(),"%m"),perl=TRUE)
[1] "7"
> gsub('^0','',format(as.Date('2010-10-10'),"%m"),perl=TRUE)
[1] "10"