R Strings

A string is an arrangement of characters. R has a good combination of built-in functions for string handling and easily manipulation of strings.

As we can use the R string built-in functions -
  • to get the length of string.
  • to reverse a string.
  • to convert the string in lowercase or uppercase.
  • to split a string.
  • to replace some part or character of a string.
  • to trim white spaces from the beginning and end of the string.
  • to convert the string in encoded form.
  • to get position of a substring or a character in a string.

Some examples of R String

str1 <- 'The biggest animal in the world is "Blue Whale".'
print(str1)
str2 <- "The biggest bird in the world is 'Ostrich'."
print(str2)




Some of the mostly used built-in functions are -

R paste() function

The paste() function of R concatenates several strings and returns the result in one long string.

Syntax of paste()

paste(str1, str2, ... ,strN, sep="", collapse = NULL)

Here, sep and collapse are optional fields. The sep represents the separator symbol and the collapse is used to eliminate the space between two strings.

paste("Hello","World")
[1] "Hello World"
> paste("Hello","World",sep="")
[1] "HelloPole"
> paste("Hello","World",sep=".")
[1] "Hello.World"
> paste("Hello",",","World","!")
[1] "Hello,World!"

R nchar() function

The nchar() function of R finds the length of a string.

Syntax of nchar()

nchar(string) 

Example

nchar("Hello World")

R substr() function

The substr() function of R returns a portion of a string. This function takes start and stop positions of the string characters range.

Syntax

substr(string, start=n1, stop=n2) 

Example

substr("Hello World", 3, 8)

R strsplit() function

The strsplit(x,split) function of R splits a string x into an R list of substrings based on another string split in x.

Syntax of strsplit()

strsplit(x, split) 

Here, x is the sentence and split is the character vector used for splitting.

Example

strsplit("Hello Jorz, How are you?", "-")




R toupper() function

The toupper function of R converts all strings to uppercase.

Syntax of toupper()

toupper(string) 

Example

toupper("Hello Jorz, How are you?")

R tolower() function

The tolower function of R converts all strings to lowercase.

Syntax of tolower()

tolower(string) 

Example

tolower("Hello Jorz, How are you?")






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