R: Character Vectors

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

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