make.unique               package:base               R Documentation

Make Character Strings Unique

Description:

     Makes the elements of a character vector unique by appending
     sequence numbers to duplicates.

Usage:

     make.unique(names, sep = ".")

Arguments:

   names: a character vector

     sep: a character string used to separate a duplicate name from its
          sequence number.

Details:

     The algorithm used by 'make.unique' has the property that
     'make.unique(c(A, B)) == make.unique(c(make.unique(A), B))'.

     In other words, you can append one string at a time to a vector,
     making it unique each time, and get the same result as applying
     'make.unique' to all of the strings at once.

     If character vector 'A' is already unique, then 'make.unique(c(A,
     B))' preserves 'A'.

Value:

     A character vector of same length as 'names' with duplicates
     changed, in the current locale's encoding.

Author(s):

     Thomas P. Minka

See Also:

     'make.names'

Examples:

     make.unique(c("a", "a", "a"))
     make.unique(c(make.unique(c("a", "a")), "a"))

     make.unique(c("a", "a", "a.2", "a"))
     make.unique(c(make.unique(c("a", "a")), "a.2", "a"))

     rbind(data.frame(x=1), data.frame(x=2), data.frame(x=3))
     rbind(rbind(data.frame(x=1), data.frame(x=2)), data.frame(x=3))

