How to Combine a Vector of Strings into a Single String in R

Overview

R is an extremely convenient language for handling data, but for those who are also familiar with other programming languages, R’s strings may feel somewhat unfamiliar. Unlike C or Python, R itself supports many features, and conversely, you can only handle things smoothly if you use those features. So when the built-in functions do not work the way you expect, it can be frustrating.

Example

For instance, suppose we have a vector made up of characters as shown above. The easy thought is that we could just use paste(), the function that combines strings, but the result is as follows.

It ends up in a strange state that is neither a vector nor a string. In such cases, you can use the collapse option of the paste() function. The string passed to the collapse option is inserted between each element of the vector, and a single string is returned. Indeed, if you run it with a single space, such as collapse = " ", you obtain the following result.

Code

Carte<-c("나는","생각한다.","고로","존재한다."); Carte
 
paste(Carte)
 
paste(Carte,collapse = " ")