Handling Strings in R

Overview

Although it is less pronounced than in the languages developers frequently use, handling strings comes up more often than you might expect in R as well. The more vast and unruly the data, the more critically important these small techniques become.

Tips

• The nchar() function simply returns the length of a string. Anyone who came from another language first has almost certainly tried typing length first.
• The substring() function, as its name easily suggests, is a function that returns a substring. In the example, it returned “God”, the 7th through 10th characters of “Oh My God”.
• The gsub() function is a function that replaces all occurrences of part of a string with another string. Naturally, it is case-sensitive.
• The casefold() function is a function that converts all uppercase letters to lowercase. In statistics or linguistics, case distinction is usually unnecessary, so it can be used conveniently.
• The strsplit() function is a function that splits a given string by some criterion and returns the resulting vector. As you can see, whitespace works too, and you can even enter ’’ to split it into individual characters.
• The paste0() function is a function that joins the given strings without whitespace.

Of course, you could just use options in the paste() function, but the code becomes much more concise and cleaner.

Code

OMG<-"Oh My God"
 
nchar(OMG)
substring(OMG,7,10)
gsub('God','Girl', OMG)
casefold(OMG)
strsplit(OMG,' ')