Concatenate inputs in R, The paste and paste0 functions in R are described in detail in this article. Let’s first look at the definitions of the two functions and the fundamental R syntax:

Concatenate inputs in R

Basic R Syntax:

paste("char1", "char2", sep = " ")
paste0("char1", "char2")

The paste and paste0 functions create a character string from several inputs.

We’ll give you four examples of how to use paste and paste0 in R programming in this article.

So let’s get started without further ado.

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Example 1: A Simple Use of R’s Paste Function

The basic functionality of the paste R function is demonstrated by the following R code:

paste("finnstats", ".com")          
"finnstats .com"

You can see that we expanded the paste function’s inputs in accordance with the R code that came before:

All of these inputs were combined into the character string “finnstats.com” by the paste function.

Quite simple! When using paste in R, there are a few things to keep in mind. The examples that follow will elaborate more on it

Example 2: Modify the paste function’s separator

The separator (i.e., the character string that is inserted between the inputs) is a crucial parameter within the paste function.

The paste function by default uses a blank as a separator (sep = ” “). However, the divider can be manually adjusted as follows:

paste("finnstats", ".com",  sep = "___")
"finnstats___.com"

In this instance, the separator “___” was utilized. But we could use pretty much whatever character string we wanted. And the distinction between paste and paste0 is just this…

Example 3: Using paste & paste0’s collapse option

Most often, vectors of strings are concatenated together using the collapse option. Think about the sample vector shown below:

x <- c("another", "example", "with", "a", "vector")    

The outcome would be as follows if we were to simply insert this example vector into the paste (or paste0) function:

paste(x)
"another" "example" "with"    "a"       "vector"

If you look at the quotations in the RStudio output, you can see that we just built a vector rather than a single-character string.

Use the collapse option to condense these vector elements into a single character string:

paste(x, collapse = " ")                                # paste vector with collapse = " "

"another example with a vector"

paste0("finnstats", ".com", "Data Science tutorials.")  # paste0 - separator not needed
finnstats .com Data Science tutorials.  

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