R Programming By Example

Characters

Text can be used just as easily, you just need to remember to use quotation marks (" ") around it. The following example shows how to save the text Hi, there! and "10" in two variables. Note that since "10.5" is surrounded by quotation marks, it is text and not a numeric value. To find what type of object you're actually dealing with you can use the class(), typeof(), and str() (short for structure) functions to get the metadata for the object in question.

In this case, since the y variable contains text, we can't multiply it by 2, as is seen in the error we get. Also, if you want to know the number of characters in a string, you can use the nchar() function, as follows:

x <- "Hi, there!"
y <- "10"
class(y)#> [1] "character" typeof(y) ...