character                package: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

