How to find the length of a string (i.e., number of characters in a string) without splitting it in R? I know how to find the length of a list but not of a string.
And what about Unicode strings? How do I find the length (in bytes) and the number of characters (runes, symbols) in a Unicode string?
Related Question:
16 Answers
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 NA Why? 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 19.966 100 and also works fine with NA's
nchar(NA) ## [1] 2 stri_length(NA) ## [1] NA EDIT 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NA argument is no longer valid if you are using latest R version.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 nchar("STRING") Check out this
0The keepNA = TRUE option prevents problems with NA
nchar(NA) ## [1] 2 nchar(NA, keepNA=TRUE) ## [1] NA nchar(YOURSTRING) you may need to convert to a character vector first;
nchar(as.character(YOURSTRING)) 
