Concatenate Two or More Strings in R

The R programming language comes with a number of useful built-in functions to work with strings. In this tutorial, we will look at one such function to concatenate two or more strings in R with the help of some examples.

How to concatenate strings in R?

You can use the built-in paste() function to concatenate two or more strings together in R. Pass the strings you want to concatenate as comma-separated arguments to the paste() function.

The following is the syntax –

# concatenate strings 
paste(s1, s2, ..., sep=" ", collapse=NULL)

You can also specify a custom separator to use while concatenating the strings using the sep parameter which is set to a single space " " by default.

It returns the concatenated string.

Examples

Let’s now look at some examples of using the above syntax to join strings together in R.

Concatenate two strings with a single space

Pass the two strings as arguments to the paste() function. Note that the order of the arguments is important as the resulting string will have the same order.

# create two strings
s1 = "Marco"
s2 = "Polo"
# concatenate strings
s <- paste(s1, s2)
# display the concatenated string
print(s)

Output:

[1] "Marco Polo"

You can see that the paste() function by default joins the strings with a single space character, " " as the separator.

You can also specify a custom separator using the sep parameter.

Let’s now join the above two strings using a comma "," as the separator.

# create two strings
s1 = "Marco"
s2 = "Polo"
# concatenate strings with comma
s <- paste(s1, s2, sep=",")
# display the concatenated string
print(s)

Output:

[1] "Marco,Polo"

The resulting string is joined using the comma character "," as the separator.

Concatenate more than two strings together

You can use the paste() function to join more than two strings together. Pass the strings you want to join as comma-separated arguments.

Let’s look at an example.

# create four strings
s1 = "You are"
s2 = "My fire"
s3 = "The one"
s4 = "Desire"
# concatenate strings with "..."
s <- paste(s1, s2, s3, s4, sep="...")
# display the concatenated string
print(s)

Output:

[1] "You are...My fire...The one...Desire"

Here, we concatenate four strings, s1, s2, s3, and s4 using"..." as the separator. We get a single concatenated string as the output.

You might also be interested in –

• Convert String to Uppercase in R
• Compare Two Strings in R (With Examples)
• R – Remove Whitespaces From String