R Strings

String Literals

Strings are used for storing text.

A string is surrounded by either single quotation marks, or double quotation marks:

"hello" is the same as 'hello':

Assign a String to a Variable

Assigning a string to a variable is done with the variable followed by the <- operator and the string:

Multiline Strings

You can assign a multiline string to a variable like this:

However, note that R will add a "\n" at the end of each line break. This is called an escape character, and the n character indicates a new line.

If you want the line breaks to be inserted at the same position as in the code, use the cat() function:

String Length

There are many usesful string functions in R.

For example, to find the number of characters in a string, use the nchar() function:

Check a String

Use the grepl() function to check if a character or a sequence of characters are present in a string:

Combine Two Strings

Use the paste() function to merge/concatenate two strings: