base (version 3.0.3)

paste: Concatenate Strings

Description

Concatenate vectors after converting to character.

Usage

paste (..., sep = " ", collapse = NULL)
paste0(..., 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_.

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 (and none are declared with encoding "bytes"), that element will be in UTF-8, otherwise in the current encoding in which case the encoding 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.If an input into an element is declared with encoding "bytes", no translation will be done of any of the elements and the resulting element will have encoding "bytes". If collapse is non-NULL, this applies also to the second, collapsing, phase, but some translation may have been done in pasting object together in the first phase.

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).

paste0(..., collapse) is equivalent to paste(..., sep = "", collapse), slightly more efficiently.

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.

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 = "")
stopifnot(identical(paste ("A", 1:6, sep = ""),
		    paste0("A", 1:6)))
paste("Today is", date())