paste: Concatenate Strings#

Description#

Concatenate (join) the corresponding and/or consecutive elements of given vectors, after converting them to strings.

Usage#

paste(..., sep = " ", collapse = NULL, recycle0 = FALSE)

paste0(..., sep = "", collapse = NULL, recycle0 = FALSE)

e1 %x+% e2

strcat(x, collapse = "", na.rm = FALSE)

Arguments#


`...`	character vectors (or objects coercible to) whose corresponding/consecutive elements are to be concatenated
`sep`	single string; separates terms
`collapse`	single string or `NULL`; an optional separator if tokens are to be merged into a single string
`recycle0`	single logical value; if `FALSE`, then empty vectors provided via `...` are silently ignored
`e1`, `e2`	character vectors (or objects coercible to) whose corresponding elements are to be concatenated
`x`	character vector (or an object coercible to) whose consecutive elements are to be concatenated
`na.rm`	single logical value; if `TRUE`, missing values are silently ignored

Details#

`%x+%` is an operator that concatenates corresponding strings from two character vectors (and which behaves just like the arithmetic `+` operator).

strcat joins (aggregates based on string concatenation) consecutive strings in a character vector, possibly with a specified separator in place, into a single string.

paste and paste0, concatenate a number of vectors using the same separator and then possibly join them into a single string. We recommend using `%x+%`, sprintf, and strcat instead (see below for discussion).

Value#

A character vector (in UTF-8).

`%x+%` preserves object attributes in a similar way as other Arithmetic operators (however, they may be lost during as.character(...) conversion, which is an S3 generic).

strcat is an aggregation function, therefore it preserves no attributes whatsoever.

Currently, paste and paste0 preserve no attributes too.

Differences from Base R#

Replacement for base paste implemented with stri_join.

Note that paste can be thought of as a string counterpart of both the `+` operator (actually, some languages do have a binary operator for string concatenation, e.g., `.` in Perl and PHP, `+` (str.__add__) in Python; R should have it too, but does not) which is additionally vectorised (‘Map’) and the sum function (‘Reduce’). Therefore, we would expect it to behave similarly with regards to the propagation of missing values and the preservation of object attributes, but it does not.

missing values treated as "NA" strings (it is a well-documented feature though) [fixed here]
partial recycling with no warning “longer object length is not a multiple of shorter object length” [fixed here]
empty vectors are treated as vectors of empty strings [fixed here]
input objects’ attributes are not preserved [fixed only in `%x+%` operator]
paste0 multiplies entities without necessity; sep="" should be the default in paste [not fixed]
paste0 treats the named argument sep="..." as one more vector to concatenate [fixed by introducing sep argument]
overloading `+.character` has no effect in R, because S3 method dispatch is done internally with hard-coded support for character arguments. We could have replaced the generic `+` with the one that calls UseMethod, but the dispatch would be done on the type of the first argument anyway (not to mention it feels like a too intrusive solution). Actually having a separate operator for concatenation (similar to PHP’s or Perl’s `.`) which always coerces to character frees the user from manual coercion (is it such a burden on the other hand?) [fixed by introducing `%x+%` operator]

It should also be noted that paste with collapse=NULL is a special case of sprintf (which is featured in many programming languages; R’s version is of course vectorised). For instance, paste(x, y, sep=",") is equivalent to sprintf("%s,%s", x, y).

Taking into account the above, paste and paste0 seem redundant and hence we mark them as [DEPRECATED]. Here are our recommendations:

the most frequent use case - concatenating corresponding strings from two character vectors with no separator - is covered by a new operator `%x+%` which propagates NAs correctly and handles object attributes the same way as the built-in arithmetic operators;
for fancy elementwise (like ‘Map’) concatenation, use our version of sprintf;
for the ‘flattening’ of consecutive strings in a character vector (like ‘Reduce’), use the new function strcat.

Author(s)#

Marek Gagolewski

Examples#

# behaviour of `+` vs. base::paste vs. stringx::paste
x <- structure(c(x=1, y=NA, z=100, w=1000), F="*")
y1 <- structure(c(a=1, b=2, c=3), G="#", F="@")
y2 <- structure(c(a=1, b=2, c=3, d=4), G="#", F="@")
y3 <- structure(1:4, G="#", F="@", dim=c(2, 2), dimnames=list(NULL, c("a", "b")))
x + y1
## Warning in x + y1: longer object length is not a multiple of shorter object
## length
##    x    y    z    w 
##    2   NA  103 1001 
## attr(,"F")
## [1] "*"
x + y2
##    x    y    z    w 
##    2   NA  103 1004 
## attr(,"G")
## [1] "#"
## attr(,"F")
## [1] "*"
x + y3
##       a    b
## [1,]  2  103
## [2,] NA 1004
## attr(,"G")
## [1] "#"
## attr(,"F")
## [1] "*"
y2 + x
##    a    b    c    d 
##    2   NA  103 1004 
## attr(,"F")
## [1] "@"
## attr(,"G")
## [1] "#"
base::paste(x, y1)
## [1] "1 1"    "NA 2"   "100 3"  "1000 1"
base::paste(x, y2)
## [1] "1 1"    "NA 2"   "100 3"  "1000 4"
base::paste(x, y3)
## [1] "1 1"    "NA 2"   "100 3"  "1000 4"
stringx::paste(x, y1)
## Warning in (function (..., sep = "", collapse = NULL, ignore_null = FALSE) :
## longer object length is not a multiple of shorter object length
## [1] "1 1"    NA       "100 3"  "1000 1"
stringx::paste(x, y2)
## [1] "1 1"    NA       "100 3"  "1000 4"
stringx::paste(x, y3)
## [1] "1 1"    NA       "100 3"  "1000 4"
base::paste(x, character(0), y2, sep=",")
## [1] "1,,1"    "NA,,2"   "100,,3"  "1000,,4"
stringx::paste(x, character(0), y2, sep=",")
## [1] "1,1"    NA       "100,3"  "1000,4"
x %x+% y1
## Warning in stringi::`%s+%`(e1, e2): longer object length is not a multiple of
## shorter object length
## [1] "11"    NA      "1003"  "10001"
x %x+% y2
## [1] "11"    NA      "1003"  "10004"
x %x+% y3
## [1] "11"    NA      "1003"  "10004"
y2 %x+% x
## [1] "11"    NA      "3100"  "41000"
x %x+% character(0)
## character(0)
strcat(x, collapse=",")
## [1] NA
strcat(x, collapse=",", na.rm=TRUE)
## [1] "1,100,1000"