| 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. |
Details
as.character and is.character are generic: you can
write methods to handle specific classes of objects,
see InternalMethods.
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;
like as.vector it strips attributes including names.
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).
References
Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth \& Brooks/Cole.
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