Collapse pasting in R  January 30, 2012  (This article was first
published on The Geokook. » R, and kindly contributed to
R-bloggers)  How do you take a vector in R, and paste the
individual elements together?  Easy, a loop.  No, bad! **slap on
the wrist**  Here’s an example why not.    So let’s start by
concatenating a few character strings and showing some examples
using base::paste:  a <- c("something", "to", "paste") [1]
"something" "to" "paste"  > paste(a, sep="_")  [1] "something"
"to" "paste" > paste(a, collapse="_")  [1] "something_to_paste"
> paste(a, sep="_", collapse="-") [1] "something-to-paste"  And
there we have it, a simple example demonstrating the difference
between a separator expression and a collapse expression without
using a hideous loop.    So finally the moral: read the help
pages!    Comments are closed.