Iterating over characters of string R

Question

Could somebody explain me why this does not print all the numbers separately in R.

numberstring <- \"0123456789\"

for (number in numberstring) {
  print(num         


        

Answer 1

Your question is not 100% clear as to the desired outcome (print each character individually from a string, or store each number in a way that the given print loop will result in each number being produced on its own line). To store numberstring such that it prints using the loop you included:

numberstring<-c(0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9)
for(number in numberstring){print(number);}

[1] 0
[1] 1
[1] 2
[1] 3
[1] 4
[1] 5
[1] 6
[1] 7
[1] 8
[1] 9
> 

Answer 2

Possible with tidyverse::str_split

numberstring <- "0123456789"
str_split(numberstring,boundary("character"))

1. '0''1''2''3''4''5''6''7''8''9'

Answer 3

Just for fun, here are a few other ways to split a string at each character.

x <- "0123456789"
substring(x, 1:nchar(x), 1:nchar(x))
# [1] "0" "1" "2" "3" "4" "5" "6" "7" "8" "9"
regmatches(x, gregexpr(".", x))[[1]]
# [1] "0" "1" "2" "3" "4" "5" "6" "7" "8" "9" 
scan(text = gsub("(.)", "\\1 ", x), what = character())
# [1] "0" "1" "2" "3" "4" "5" "6" "7" "8" "9"

Answer 4

In R "0123456789" is a character vector of length 1.

If you want to iterate over the characters, you have to split the string into a vector of single characters using strsplit.

numberstring <- "0123456789"

numberstring_split <- strsplit(numberstring, "")[[1]]

for (number in numberstring_split) {
  print(number)
}
# [1] "0"
# [1] "1"
# [1] "2"
# [1] "3"
# [1] "4"
# [1] "5"
# [1] "6"
# [1] "7"
# [1] "8"
# [1] "9"