Beware: 2 is not always 2 in R

[This article was first published on Are you cereal? » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

This post is minimalistic.
Consider this:

x <- 2.0000001

Now let's have look at what's inside x:

x
> [1] 2

But is it really true?

x==2
> [1] FALSE

Here you go.
A colleague of mine was once ruined by this for an entire day before we realized what was going on.
So, how to find out what REALLY is the value of x?
Try:

as.character(x)
> [1] "2.0000001"

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Are you cereal? » R.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)