How can two strings be concatenated?

Question

How can I concatenate (merge, combine) two values? For example I have:

tmp = cbind(\"GAD\", \"AB\")
tmp
#      [,1]  [,2]
# [1,] \"GAD\" \"AB\"

Answer 1

As others have pointed out, paste() is the way to go. But it can get annoying to have to type paste(str1, str2, str3, sep='') everytime you want the non-default separator.

You can very easily create wrapper functions that make life much simpler. For instance, if you find yourself concatenating strings with no separator really often, you can do:

p <- function(..., sep='') {
    paste(..., sep=sep, collapse=sep)
}

or if you often want to join strings from a vector (like implode() from PHP):

implode <- function(..., sep='') {
     paste(..., collapse=sep)
}

Allows you do do this:

p('a', 'b', 'c')
#[1] "abc"
vec <- c('a', 'b', 'c')
implode(vec)
#[1] "abc"
implode(vec, sep=', ')
#[1] "a, b, c"

Also, there is the built-in paste0, which does the same thing as my implode, but without allowing custom separators. It's slightly more efficient than paste().

Answer 2

Another way:

sprintf("%s you can add other static strings here %s",string1,string2)

It sometimes useful than paste() function. %s denotes the place where the subjective strings will be included.

Note that this will come in handy as you try to build a path:

sprintf("/%s", paste("this", "is", "a", "path", sep="/"))

output

/this/is/a/path

Answer 3

Another non-paste answer:

x <- capture.output(cat(data, sep = ","))
x
[1] "GAD,AB"

Where

 data <- c("GAD", "AB")

Answer 4

help.search() is a handy function, e.g.

> help.search("concatenate")

will lead you to paste().

Answer 5

Alternatively, if your objective is to output directly to a file or stdout, you can use cat:

cat(s1, s2, sep=", ")

Answer 6

Consider the case where the strings are columns and the result should be a new column:

df <- data.frame(a = letters[1:5], b = LETTERS[1:5], c = 1:5)

df$new_col <- do.call(paste, c(df[c("a", "b")], sep = ", ")) 
df
#  a b c new_col
#1 a A 1    a, A
#2 b B 2    b, B
#3 c C 3    c, C
#4 d D 4    d, D
#5 e E 5    e, E

Optionally, skip the [c("a", "b")] subsetting if all columns needs to be pasted.

# you can also try str_c from stringr package as mentioned by other users too!
do.call(str_c, c(df[c("a", "b")], sep = ", "))