Question

What’s the most straight forward way of overloading ‘+’ for characters?
I have defined '%+%' <- function(...) paste(...,sep=""):

str <- "aa"%+%"bb"%+%"cc" #str="aabbcc"

But I don’t like the syntax. I think str <- "aa"+"bb"+"cc" would be nicer.

(I am building long SQL queries to use with RODBC, the usual paste is not very handy in such situations. Any suggestions?)

Answer 1

I think that using two arguments is better than the dots:

'%+%' <- function(x,y) paste(x,y,sep="")

"a"%+%"b"%+%"C"
[1] "abC"

If you really really want to you can overwrite +, but be veeeeery careful when doing this as you will break one of the most important functions in R. I can’t think of any reason why you would want to do that over %+%:

# '+' <- function(x,y) paste(x,y,sep="")
# "a"+"b"+"C"
# [1] "abC"

rm('+')

commented it out to be sure I don’t accidently break someones R:)