How to Combine and Split Strings in R

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DataDaft

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Published on November 12, 2019 6:20:29 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs4Iuls46Us

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Guide

Duration: 2:36

3,654 views

49

Character string data manipulation is among the most common data cleaning tasks. Combining two or more strings into one, also known as string concatenation is one of the most basic character data manipulations that you're likely to encounter. It is also useful to know how to perform the reverse operation, splitting an existing string into two or more parts.

Code used in this clip:

string1 ＜- "Combine"
string2 ＜- "Me"
string3 ＜- "Split"

# Concatenate strings
paste(string1, string2)

# Combine with a specified separator
combined ＜- paste(string3, string2, sep = "--")
combined

# Split the combined string
strsplit(combined, split="--")

# Elementwise concatenation

vector1 ＜- c("Luke", "Han", "Lando")
vector2 ＜- c("Skywalker", "Solo", "Calrissian")

combined_vector ＜- paste(vector1, vector2)
combined_vector

# Elementwise splitting
strsplit(combined_vector, split=" ")

# Concatenate vector elements together into a single string
paste(vector1, collapse = "--")



Code Clips are basic code explanations in 3 minutes or less. They are intended to be short reference guides that provide quick breakdowns and copy/paste access to code needed to accomplish common data science tasks. Think Stack Overflow with a video explanation.


* Note: YouTube does not allow greater than or less than symbols in the text description, so the code above will not be exactly the same as the code shown in the video! For R that means I may use = for assignment and the special Unicode large ＜ and ＞ symbols in place of the standard sized ones for dplyr pipes and comparisons. These special symbols should work as expected for R code on Windows, but may need to be replaced with standard greater than and less than symbols for other operating systems.