paste {base}R Documentation

Concatenate Strings

Description

Concatenate vectors after converting to character.

Usage

paste(..., sep = " ", collapse = NULL)

Arguments

... one or more R objects, to be converted to character vectors.
sep a character string to separate the terms. Not NA_character_.
collapse an optional character string to separate the results. Not NA_character_.

Details

paste converts its arguments (via as.character) to character strings, and concatenates them (separating them by the string given by sep). If the arguments are vectors, they are concatenated term-by-term to give a character vector result. Vector arguments are recycled as needed, with zero-length arguments being recycled to "".

Note that paste() coerces NA_character_, the character missing value, to "NA" which may seem undesirable, e.g., when pasting two character vectors, or very desirable, e.g. in paste("the value of p is ", p).

If a value is specified for collapse, the values in the result are then concatenated into a single string, with the elements being separated by the value of collapse.

Value

A character vector of the concatenated values. This will be of length zero if all the objects are, unless collapse is non-NULL in which case it is a single empty string.
If any input into an element of the result is in UTF-8, that element will be in UTF-8, otherwise in the current encoding in which case the encoding of an element of the element is declared if the current locale is either Latin-1 or UTF-8, at least one of the corresponding inputs (including separators) had a declared encoding and all inputs were either ASCII or declared.

References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

See Also

String manipulation with as.character, substr, nchar, strsplit; further, cat which concatenates and writes to a file, and sprintf for C like string construction.

plotmath’ for the use of paste in plot annotation.

Examples

paste(1:12) # same as as.character(1:12)
paste("A", 1:6, sep = "")
paste("Today is", date())

[Package base version 2.9.1 Index]