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)
• Pattern Matching and Replacement
• strsplit function

Input and output

• Reading and writing strings