Character
A character object is used to represent string values in R. We convert objects into character values with the as.character() function:
> x = as.character(3.14)
> x # print the character string
[1] "3.14"
> class(x) # print the class name of x
[1] "character"
> x # print the character string
[1] "3.14"
> class(x) # print the class name of x
[1] "character"
Two character values can be concatenated with the paste function.
However, it is often more convenient to create a readable string with the sprintf function, which has a C language syntax.
To extract a substring, we apply the substr function. Here is an example showing how to extract the substring between the third and twelfth positions in a string.
And to replace the first occurrence of the word "little" by another word "big" in the string, we apply the sub function.
More functions for string manipulation can be found in the R documentation.
