Basic String Operations

In this course, we will often be dealing with text data. These are also called character strings in R.

example <- "Hello World"

To merge two strings we can use the paste() function. This function uses a separator which is by default ” “.

 
new_example <- paste("Hello World", "how is your day")
 ##[1] "Hello World how is your day"

We can also change that separator.

new_example <- paste("Hello World", "how is your day", sep=", ")

 
new_example
 ##[1] "Hello World, how is your day"

To split a string we can use the strsplit() function.

 
strsplit(new_example, ",")
 ##[1] "Hello World"      " how is your day"

When using the strsplit()function, R returns us a nested list. To access only the elements of the sublist we can ask for the first element in the sublist [[1]].

strsplit(new_example, ",")[[1]]
 ## [1] "Hello World"      " how is your day"
 

As you will see in the remainder of the course, some functions return nested lists. This is a frequent source of trouble for people who are new to R. So if you have difficulties accessing specific elements in a vector, check to see whether you are dealing with a sublist.

access_time Last update May 8, 2020.

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