title: The fastest way to convert numeric to character in R
body: <p>I need to convert a numeric vector into character in R. As I know, there are different ways (see below).</p>
  
  <p>It seems the fastest ways are sprintf and gettextf.</p>
  
  <pre><code>set.seed(1)
  a &lt;- round(runif(100000), 2)
  system.time(b1 &lt;- as.character(a))
     user  system elapsed 
    0.108   0.000   0.105 
  system.time(b2 &lt;- formatC(a))
     user  system elapsed 
    0.052   0.000   0.052 
  system.time(b3 &lt;- sprintf('%.2f', a))
     user  system elapsed 
    0.044   0.000   0.046 
  system.time(b4 &lt;- gettextf('%.2f', a))
     user  system elapsed 
    0.048   0.000   0.046 
  system.time(b5 &lt;- paste0('', a))
     user  system elapsed 
    0.124   0.000   0.129 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Are there other methods to convert numeric into character in R? Thanks for any suggestions.</p>