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How to create a character vector in R? Use character() or c() functions to create a character vector. character() creates a vector with a specified length of all empty strings whereas c() creates a vector with the specified values, if all values are strings then it creates a character vector.

A vector whose all elements are either string or NA values is called a character vector.

1. Quick Examples of Create Character Vector

The following are quick examples of how to create a character vector in R.


# Quick Examples

# Create Character Vector
v <- c('a1','ABC','bc','A',NA)
print(v)
typeof(v)

# Create Character Vector of empty Strings
v <- character(5)
length(v)
print(v)

# Create Empty Character Vector
v <- character()

2. Create Character Vector in R

c() function is used to create a vector. By passing all elements with characters to c() function it creates a character vector in R. Use typeof() to check whether the created is a character vector or not.


# Create Character Vector
v <- c('a1','ABC','bc','A',NA)
print(v)
typeof(v)

Yields below output


# Output
> print(v)
[1] "a1"  "ABC" "bc"  "A"   NA   
> typeof(v)
[1] "character"

3. Create a Character Vector of Empty Strings

The character() function creates a character vector in R of a specified length. All elements of the vector will contain the empty string “”. The following example initializes a character vector of length 5 with all empty strings.


# Create Character Vector of empty Strings
v <- character(5)
length(v)
print(v)

Yields below output


# Output
> length(v)
[1] 5
> print(v)
[1] "" "" "" "" ""

4. Empty Character Vector

character() function by default creates an empty vector in R of type character. When no argument is used, it by default takes 0 to length param and creates zero length vector. typeof(character()) returns character type.


# Create Empty Character Vector
v <- character()
print(v)

Yields below output.


# Output
> print(v)
character(0)

5. Convert to Character Vector

If you have a numeric vector, you can easily convert it to a character vector by using as.character() function. as.character() function is used to convert the vector of any type to the character type. This function takes the values of non-character and creates a character vector.


# Convert to Character Cector
v <- as.character(1,2,3)
typeof(v)

Yields below output


# Output
> typeof(v)
[1] "character"

Conclusion

In this article, you have learned how to create a character vector in R by using functions c() and character(). Function character() creates a vector with the specified length of all empty string values whereas c() initializes a vector with the specified values. You can find the complete example from this article at Github R Programming Examples Project.

References

Naveen Nelamali

Naveen Nelamali (NNK) is a Data Engineer with 20+ years of experience in transforming data into actionable insights. Over the years, He has honed his expertise in designing, implementing, and maintaining data pipelines with frameworks like Apache Spark, PySpark, Pandas, R, Hive and Machine Learning. Naveen journey in the field of data engineering has been a continuous learning, innovation, and a strong commitment to data integrity. In this blog, he shares his experiences with the data as he come across. Follow Naveen @ LinkedIn and Medium