In R: Joining vector elements by row, converting vector rows to strings

Question

Is there a \"by row\" operation in R to convert each row in a vector like this to strings?

> d= cbind(\"Data\", c(\"2\", \"73\"))
> d
     [,1]   [,2]
         


        

Answer 1

After a quick glace at ?paste, it's clear that apply isn't needed for the example given. It would be handy if there are several columns though.

> paste(d[,1],d[,2])
[1] "Data 2"  "Data 73"

Answer 2

A general way to do it without resorting to ?apply:

do.call(paste, as.data.frame(d))
[1] "Data 2"  "Data 73"

Where as.data.frame is used to avoid subscripts.

Edit:

do.call is a function which takes another function as first argument, and a list as second argument. It is often used to send lists of arguments to functions (in our case, the columns of d to paste()). We send d as a data.frame (a type of list) for this trick to work.

Answer 3

Yes, there is. It is called "apply" ;-)

apply(d,1,paste,collapse=" ")
[1] "Data 2"  "Data 73"
# convert to matrix using as.matrix to get exactly your solution

See ?apply and ?paste