R: Concatenate Strings

paste {base} | R Documentation

## Concatenate Strings

### Description

Concatenate vectors after converting to character.

### Usage

    paste (..., sep = " ", collapse = NULL)
    paste0(..., collapse = NULL)

### Arguments

`...` | one or more R objects, to be converted to character vectors.
`sep` | a character string to separate the terms. Not `NA_character_`.
`collapse` | an optional character string to separate the results. Not `NA_character_`.

### Details

`paste` converts its arguments (via `as.character`) to character strings, and concatenates them (separating them by the string given by `sep`). If the arguments are vectors, they are concatenated term-by-term to give a character vector result. Vector arguments are recycled as needed, with zero-length arguments being recycled to `""`.

Note that `paste()` coerces `NA_character_`, the character missing value, to `"NA"` which may seem undesirable, e.g., when pasting two character vectors, or very desirable, e.g. in `paste("the value of p is ", p)`.

`paste0(..., collapse)` is equivalent to `paste(..., sep = "", collapse)`, slightly more efficiently.

If a value is specified for `collapse`, the values in the result are then concatenated into a single string, with the elements being separated by the value of `collapse`.

### Value

A character vector of the concatenated values. This will be of length zero if all the objects are, unless `collapse` is non-NULL in which case it is a single empty string.

If any input into an element of the result is in UTF-8 (and none are declared with encoding `"bytes"`), that element will be in UTF-8, otherwise in the current encoding in which case the encoding of the element is declared if the current locale is either Latin-1 or UTF-8, at least one of the corresponding inputs (including separators) had a declared encoding and all inputs were either ASCII or declared.

If an input into an element is declared with encoding `"bytes"`, no translation will be done of any of the elements and the resulting element will have encoding `"bytes"`. If `collapse` is non-NULL, this applies also to the second, collapsing, phase, but some translation may have been done in pasting object together in the first phase.

### References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

### See Also

String manipulation with `as.character`, `substr`, `nchar`, `strsplit`; further, `cat` which concatenates and writes to a file, and `sprintf` for C like string construction.

‘plotmath’ for the use of `paste` in plot annotation.

### Examples

    paste(1:12) # same as as.character(1:12)
    paste("A", 1:6, sep = "")
    stopifnot(identical(paste ("A", 1:6, sep = ""),
    		    paste0("A", 1:6)))
    paste("Today is", date())

[Package base version 2.15.1 Index]