6.3 Concatenate Strings

20180720 One of the most basic operations in string manipulation is the concatenate operation. R provides alternatives for doing so but a modern favourite is the %s+ operator from stringi (Gagolewski et al. 2024).

"abc" %s+% "def" %s+% "ghi"

## [1] "abcdefghi"

c("abc", "def", "ghi", "jkl") %s+% c("mno")

## [1] "abcmno" "defmno" "ghimno" "jklmno"

c("abc", "def", "ghi", "jkl") %s+% c("mno", "pqr")

## [1] "abcmno" "defpqr" "ghimno" "jklpqr"

c("abc", "def", "ghi", "jkl") %s+% c("mno", "pqr", "stu", "vwx")

## [1] "abcmno" "defpqr" "ghistu" "jklvwx"

The tidy function for concatenating strings is stringr::str_c(). A sep= can be used to specify a separator for the concatenated strings.

str_c("hello", "world")

## [1] "helloworld"

str_c("hello", "world", sep=" ")

## [1] "hello world"

We can also concatenate strings using glue::glue().

glue("hello", "world")

## helloworld

The traditional base::cat() function returns the concatenation of the supplied strings. Numeric and other complex objects are converted into character strings.

cat("hello", "world")

## hello world

cat ("hello", 123, "world")

## hello 123 world

Yet another alternative (and there are many) is the function backports::paste(). Notice that it separates the concatenated strings with a space.

paste("hello", "world")

## [1] "hello world"

References

Gagolewski, Marek, Bartek Tartanus, others; Unicode, Inc., et al. 2024. Stringi: Fast and Portable Character String Processing Facilities. https://stringi.gagolewski.com/.

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