Concatenating Strings in R – Paste and Collapse

String concatenation and text assembly in R is handled via paste and related functions. There are a couple of different options and variants which can help you get your desired outcome.

Simple Concatenation in R – paste()

Learning how to concatenate in R is pretty easy. Let’s start with the base case – using paste() to convert a vector of values into a string. The paste() function accepts three sets of arguments:

  • The list of values you wish to convert into a string
  • the sep parameter – a character string you want to interject between each term
  • the collapse parameter – a character string you want to interject between each result

The sep and collapse options for the paste function allow you to layer the text or symbols you use when concatenating strings. This can be useful when constructing file formats or system output.

Lets start with a trivial case. 

# paste R - concatenate string in R
> result <- paste ("the", "quick", "brown", "fox", "jumps", sep=" ") 
> result
[1] "the quick brown fox jumps"

In this case, we are using r’s paste function to concatenate values into a single string.

Introducing The Collapse parameter

A key limitation in the input argument example above: we assume we’re concatenating a constant number of arguments. This doesn’t always occur in the real world. Suppose we want to write an R concatenate function which generates comma delimited text for an unspecified number of arguments. Perhaps we’re working on the (always popular) custom XML format for passing data into a web application’s API. Or unpacking an unusual format from an old database. In any event, we may wish to write our process to accept information as a character vector of unspecified length. Repeating the example above as a character vector…

# collapse vector into string r - first attempt
> result <- paste (c("the", "quick", "brown", "fox", "jumps"), sep=" ")
> result
[1] "the"   "quick" "brown" "fox"   "jumps"

An efficient conversion of vector to text, but we’ve retained the fragmented nature of the original data. A small change is needed, to string these elements together. We shall specify a “collapse” parameter to concatenate the results into a single string. As shown in the concatenate vector example below:

# collapse vector into string r - working version
> result <- paste (c("the", "quick", "brown", "fox", "jumps"), sep=" ", collapse = " ")
> result
[1] "the quick brown fox jumps"

R collapse – Concatenating multiple sets of strings

These functions can be combined to create a more complicated format string. For example, suppose we have a vector of information from a database that we want to convert into a dictionary format.

# vector of values for r collapse vector example
c("12 NE 1st Street", "New York", "NY", "Donor", "Gold")

We know what each of these values is:

# data mapping for r collapse vector example

And we would like our final format string to be something along the lines of:

key:value,key:value

So we present the paste function with two vectors – the first being field names (column names, row names, etc), the second containing field values. We join them using a colon and join the pieces together using semi-colons and the r collapse parameter into one input string sequence. Code is below.

# paste r example
paste(c("address", "city", "state", "status", "tier"), c("12 NE 1st Street", "New York", "NY", "Donor", "Gold"),sep=":",collapse=',')

Yielding a result of:

# paste r result
"address:12 NE 1st Street;city:New York;state:NY;status:Donor;tier:Gold"

Which is an example of how you can use paste to concatenate strings in R to build complex formats. R collapse allows you to speed up the string manipulation process.

Shortcuts – paste vs. paste0 functions

The default value of sep is a blank space. Since reducing a vector to a string value without any separating space is a common use case, a shorthand version of the function sequence has been developed. The paste0 function has a zero length space as it’s default value for separator. In effect, using paste0 is the same as declaring:

# paste0 - concatenate strings in r without space
> paste0('my','lazy','dog')
[1] "mylazydog"
> paste('my','lazy','dog','sep'= '')
[1] "mylazydog"

# paste0 yields the same result as a longer paste r statement

That covers paste0; it is basically just a helper function to keep your each code object and element clean in your new string. You can use to quickly roll up data. If you need to work with multiple vector arguments in a dataframe or array, remember to look at the R collapse concatenation operator as indicated above.

For more information about handy functions for cleaning up data, check out our functions reference.

This page covers concatenating strings in R using r paste, r collapse, r paste0