nchar: Get Length or Width of Strings¶

Description¶

nchar computes the number of code points, bytes used, or estimated total width of strings in a character vector. nzchar indicates which strings are empty.

Usage¶

nchar(x, type = "chars", allowNA = FALSE, keepNA = TRUE)

nzchar(x, keepNA = TRUE)

Arguments¶


`x`	character vector or an object coercible to
`type`	`"chars"` gives the number of code points, `"width"` estimates the string width, `"bytes"` computes the number of bytes
`allowNA`	not used (with a warning if attempting to do so) [DEPRECATED]
`keepNA`	if `FALSE`, missing values will be treated as `"NA"` strings; otherwise, the corresponding outputs will be missing as well [DEPRECATED]

Details¶

String width might be useful when displaying text using a monospaced font.

Value¶

nchar returns an integer vector.

nzchar returns a logical vector, where TRUE indicates that the corresponding string is of non-zero length (i.e., non-empty).

Differences from Base R¶

Replacement for base nchar and nzchar implemented with stri_length, stri_width, stri_numbytes, and stri_isempty.

keepNA does not default to TRUE, and hence missing values are treated as "NA" strings [fixed here]
some emojis, combining characters and modifiers (e.g., skin tones) are not recognised properly [fixed here]
only the names attribute is propagated [fixed here]

Author(s)¶

Marek Gagolewski

Examples¶

x <- c(
    "\U0001F4A9",
    "\U0001F64D\U0001F3FC\U0000200D\U00002642\U0000FE0F",
    "\U0001F64D\U0001F3FB\U0000200D\U00002642",
    "\U000026F9\U0001F3FF\U0000200D\U00002640\U0000FE0F",
    "\U0001F3F4\U000E0067\U000E0062\U000E0073\U000E0063\U000E0074\U000E007F"
)
print(x)
## [1] "💩"    "🙍🏼‍♂️" "🙍🏻‍♂" "⛹🏿‍♀️"  "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿"
base::nchar(x, "width")
## [1] 2 5 5 4 2
stringx::nchar(x, "width")
## [1] 2 2 2 2 2