character {base}

R Documentation

Character Vectors

Description

Create or test for objects of type "character".

Usage

character(length = 0)
as.character(x, ...)
is.character(x)

Arguments

length	desired length.
x	object to be coerced or tested.
...	further arguments passed to or from other methods.

Value

character creates a character vector of the specified length. The elements of the vector are all equal to "".

as.character attempts to coerce its argument to character type.

is.character returns TRUE or FALSE depending on whether its argument is of character type or not.

Note

as.character truncates components of language objects to 500 characters (was about 70 before 1.3.1).

See Also

paste, substr and strsplit for character concatenation and splitting, chartr for character translation and casefolding (e.g. upper to lower case) and sub, grep etc for string matching and substitutions. Note that help.search(keyword = "character") gives even more links. deparse, which is normally preferable to as.character for language objects.

Examples

form <- y ~ a + b + c
as.character(form)  ## length 3
deparse(form)       ## like the input

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