The “paste” Function in R

• Package: Base R (No specific package, it’s a built-in function)

• Purpose: To concatenate (paste) vectors after converting them to character.

• General Class: String Manipulation

• Required Argument(s):

• ...: A sequence of character vectors to be concatenated.

• Notable Optional Arguments:

• sep: A character string used to separate the concatenated elements. The default is a single space.

• collapse: A character string used to concatenate the result into a single string.

• Example:

• # Starting name of the File

  File_Name = "Text_File"

  # Character between name and number

  File_Sep = "_"

  # File extension

  File_Ext = ".txt"

  # The number of file names

  File_N = 10

  # The names and numbers pasted together into a vector

  File_Vec = paste(File_Name, File_Sep, 1:File_N, File_Ext, sep = "")

  # Print the file names

  print(File_Vec)

  # Example using collapse

  paste(c("These", "were", "seperate", "vector", "elements!"), collapse = " ")

• In this example, the paste function and the “sep” argument generate a vector of file names. This can be used when you save multiple files from a process being run, such as during a simulation study. The last line of code demonstrates the behavior of the “collapse” argument. The “collapse” argument joins the elements of a vector into a single character element (or a vector of length 1 if you prefer to think of it like that).