How to find the length of a string in R
See ?nchar. For example:
> nchar("foo")[1] 3> set.seed(10)> strn <- paste(sample(LETTERS, 10), collapse = "")> strn[1] "NHKPBEFTLY"> nchar(strn)[1] 10
Use stringi package and stri_length function
> stri_length(c("ala ma kota","ABC",NA))[1] 11 3 NAWhy? Because it is the FASTEST among presented solutions :)
require(microbenchmark)require(stringi)require(stringr)x <- c(letters,NA,paste(sample(letters,2000,TRUE),collapse=" "))microbenchmark(nchar(x),str_length(x),stri_length(x))Unit: microseconds expr min lq median uq max neval nchar(x) 11.868 12.776 13.1590 13.6475 41.815 100 str_length(x) 30.715 33.159 33.6825 34.1360 173.400 100 stri_length(x) 2.653 3.281 4.0495 4.5380 19.966 100and also works fine with NA's
nchar(NA)## [1] 2stri_length(NA)## [1] NAEDIT 2021
NA argument is no longer valid if you are using latest R version.
You could also use the stringr package:
library(stringr)str_length("foo")[1] 3