Site icon R-bloggers

Collapse pasting in R

[This article was first published on The Geokook. » 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.

How do you take a vector in R, and paste the individual elements together?  Easy, a loop.  No, bad! **slap on the wrist**  Here’s an example why not.  

So let’s start by concatenating a few character strings and showing some examples using base::paste:

a <- c("something", "to", "paste")
[1] "something" "to" "paste" 
> paste(a, sep="_") 
[1] "something" "to" "paste"
> paste(a, collapse="_") 
[1] "something_to_paste"
> paste(a, sep="_", collapse="-")
[1] "something-to-paste"

And there we have it, a simple example demonstrating the difference between a separator expression and a collapse expression without using a hideous loop.  

So finally the moral: read the help pages!


To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: The Geokook. » 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.