# The character class
Characters are what other languages call 'string vectors.'
# Coercion
To check whether a value is a character use the is.character() function. To coerce a variable to a character use the as.character() function.
x <- "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
class(x)
[1] "character"
is.character(x)
[1] TRUE
Note that numerics can be coerced to characters, but attempting to coerce a character to numeric may result in NA.
as.numeric("2")
[1] 2
as.numeric("fox")
[1] NA
Warning message:
NAs introduced by coercion
# Remarks
# Related topics
Patterns
- Regular Expressions (regex) (opens new window)
- Pattern Matching and Replacement (opens new window)
- strsplit function (opens new window)
Input and output