Question

Is there a “by row” operation in R to convert each row in a vector like this to strings?

> d= cbind("Data", c("2", "73"))
> d
     [,1]   [,2]
[1,] "Data" "2" 
[2,] "Data" "73"

What I want is to get strings like

     [,1]
[1,] "Data 2"
[2,] "Data 73"

Is there an easy way to join items by row?

Answer 1

Yes, there is. It is called “apply” 😉

apply(d,1,paste,collapse=" ")
[1] "Data 2"  "Data 73"
# convert to matrix using as.matrix to get exactly your solution

See ?apply and ?paste