Question

Say there’s a vector x:

x <- c("a", " ", "b")

and I want to quickly turn this into a single string “a b”. Is there a way to do this without a loop? I know with a loop I could do this:

y <- ""
for (i in 1:3){
    paste(y, x[i], sep = "")
}

> y
[1] "a b"

but I will need to do this over many, many iterations, and having to loop over this and replace the original with the new each time would become very time consuming. I always want to be able to do something like this:

x <- paste(x)

as if paste() could smartly divide up the elements of a vector itself, but I know it can’t. Is there another function, or a more creative way to use paste(), which can accomplish this efficiently?

Answer 1

You just need to use the collapse argument:

paste(x,collapse="")