R - How to test for character(0) in IF statement

Question

I imagine this is incredibly simple but I cant seem to find the answer.

I am writing an IF statement but the test is if the object returns a character(0)

Answer 1

Use the identical function to check this.

a <- character(0)
identical(a, character(0))  # returns TRUE

identical(a, "")           # returns FALSE
identical(a, numeric(0))   # returns also FALSE