6.5 Glue Strings Together

20180729 The glue (Hester and Bryan 2026) package provides a mechanism for building output strings from a collection of strings and variables. The basic use of glue::glue() will concatenate its string arguments with variable substitution identified using curly braces. In this exmaple we use the rattle::weatherAUS and format large numbers using scales::comma().

dsname <- "weatherAUS"
nobs   <- nrow(weatherAUS)
starts <- min(weatherAUS$Date)
glue("The {dsname} dataset",
     " has just less than {comma(nobs + 1)} observations,",
     " starting from {format(starts, '%-d %B %Y')}.")

## The weatherAUS dataset has just less than 275,411 observations, starting from 1 November 2007.

We can manually wrap the sentence.

glue("
     The {dsname} dataset has just
     less than {comma(nobs + 1)} observations
     starting from {format(starts, '%-d %B %Y')}.
     ")

## The weatherAUS dataset has just
## less than 275,411 observations
## starting from 1 November 2007.

Notice how the initial and last empty lines are handled ``as expected’’, and the line split is maintained.

Named arguments within the function call can be used to assign values to variables that only exist in the scope of the function call.

glue("
     The {dsname} dataset has just
         less than {comma(nobs + 1)} observations
     starting from {format(starts, '%-d %B %Y')}.
     ",
     dsname = "weather",
     nobs   = nrow(weather),
     starts = min(weather$Date))

## The weather dataset has just
##     less than 367 observations
## starting from 1 July 2023.

We can also see the effect of indenting lines in this example, where the indentation is retained.

References

Hester, Jim, and Jennifer Bryan. 2026. Glue: Interpreted String Literals. https://glue.tidyverse.org/.

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