Relational operators with tolerance

Binary operators which allow the comparison of values in numeric vectors.

x %>=% y

x %>>% y

x %<=% y

x %<<% y

x %==% y

x %!=% y

Arguments

x

Any numeric object.

y

Any numeric object.

Value

A logical vector indicating the result of the element by element comparison. The elements of shorter vectors are recycled as necessary.

Details

These are similar to their counterparts in base, except a tolerance fpCompare.tolerance can be specified via options to account for floating point rounding errors:

fpCompare	base
----------------	-----------
%>=%	>=
%>>%	>
%<=%	<=
%<<%	<
%==%	==
%!=%	!=

Inspired by R FAQ 7.31 (https://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Why-doesn_0027t-R-think-these-numbers-are-equal_003f) and this post (https://stackoverflow.com/a/2769618/1380598).

See also

all.equal, .Machine

Author

Alex Chubaty

Examples

x1 <- 0.5 - 0.3
x2 <- 0.3 - 0.1
x1 == x2                           # FALSE on most machines
#> [1] FALSE
x1 %==% x2                         # TRUE everywhere
#> [1] TRUE
identical(all.equal(x1, x2), TRUE) # TRUE everywhere
#> [1] TRUE

set.seed(123)
a <- 1:6
b <- jitter(1:6, 1e-7)
print(rbind(a, b), digits = 16)
#>                 [,1]              [,2]              [,3]              [,4]
#> a 1.0000000000000000 2.000000000000000 3.000000000000000 4.000000000000000
#> b 0.9999999915031008 2.000000011532205 2.999999996359077 4.000000015320696
#>                [,5]             [,6]
#> a 5.000000000000000 6.00000000000000
#> b 5.000000017618691 5.99999998182226

b %<=% a
#> [1]  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE FALSE  TRUE
b %<<% a
#> [1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE  TRUE
b %>=% a
#> [1]  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE
b %>>% a
#> [1] FALSE FALSE FALSE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE
b %==% a
#> [1]  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE
b %!=% a
#> [1] FALSE FALSE FALSE  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE