R Strings

String Literals

Strings are used for storing text.

A string is surrounded by either single quotation marks, or double quotation marks:

"hello" is the same as 'hello':

Example

  "hello"
'hello'

Assign a String to a Variable

Assigning a string to a variable is done with the variable followed by the <- operator and the string:

Example

  str <- "Hello"
str # print the value of str

Multiline Strings

You can assign a multiline string to a variable like this:

Example

  str <- "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetur adipiscing elit,
sed do
  eiusmod tempor incididunt
ut labore et dolore magna aliqua."

  str # print the value of str

However, note that R will add a "\n" at the end of each line break. This is called an escape character, and the n character indicates a new line.

If you want the line breaks to be inserted at the same position as in the code, use the cat() function:

Example

  str <- "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetur adipiscing elit,
sed do
  eiusmod tempor incididunt
ut labore et dolore magna aliqua."

cat(str)

String Length

There are many useful string functions in R.

For example, to find the number of characters in a string, use the nchar() function:

Example

  str <- "Hello World!"

nchar(str)

Check a String

Use the grepl() function to check if a character or a sequence of characters are present in a string:

Example

  str <- "Hello World!"

grepl("H", str)
grepl("Hello",
  str)
grepl("X",
  str)

Combine Two Strings

Use the paste() function to merge/concatenate two strings:

Example

  str1 <- "Hello"
str2 <- "World"

  paste(str1, str2)