R - How to test for character(0) in IF statement
Use the identical function to check this.
a <- character(0)identical(a, character(0)) # returns TRUEidentical(a, "") # returns FALSEidentical(a, numeric(0)) # returns also FALSE
Adding the obligatory tidyverse answer. The rlang package has the function is_empty(), which does exactly what you want.
Test <- character(0)rlang::is_empty(Test)#[1] TRUEThis also works for empty vectors that aren't characters. For example, it works in the case that Patrick Roocks describes in comments.
Test <- as.Date(character(0))rlang::is_empty(Test)#[1] TRUELoading the 'tidyverse' package also loads is_empty().
Use the length() method:
> check <- function(value) {+ if (length(value)==0) {+ print('Empty')+ } else {+ print('Not Empty')+ }+ }> check("Hello World")[1] "Not Empty"> check("")[1] "Not Empty"> check(character(0))[1] "Empty"