
Chapter 5
Working with Character Data
5.1 Introduction
Working with character data is fundamental to many tasks in computational
biology, but is not that common of a problem in statistical applications. The
to ols that are available in R are more oriented to the processing of data
into a form that is suitable for statistical analysis, or to format outputs for
publication. There is an increased awareness, and corresponding capabilities,
for dealing with different languages and file encodings, but we will not do
more than briefly touch on this subject. In this chapter we review the builtin
capabilities in R, but then turn our attention to some problems that ...