RogBlog

One of the things I do to my Sweave output is to make scientific notation more transparent.  I have a special R function for this which I use in my Sweave documents:

myFormat <- function(...) {
tmp <- format(...)
return(sub("e(.*)","\\\\\\\\times 10^{\\1}",tmp))
}

Note in particular the ridiculous number of backslashes required in the call to sub() to obtain a single backslash in the string output.  I have no idea why so many backslashes are needed—but apparently they are.  Hopefully this will save someone else the headache of figuring out the magic number by trial and error!