The “paste0” Function in R
Package: Base R (No specific package, it’s a built-in function)
Purpose: To concatenate (paste) vectors without any separator.
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 no 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(s)
File_Sep = "_"
# File extension
File_Ext = ".txt"
# The number of file names
File_N = 10
# The names and numbers are pasted together
File_Vec = paste0(File_Name, File_Sep, 1:File_N, File_Ext)
# Print the file names
print(File_Vec)
# Example using collapse
paste0(c("These", "were", "seperate", "vector", "elements!"), collapse = " ")
In this example, the paste function along with the “sep” argument is used to generate a vector of file names (the sep argument equals ““ by default). 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).