TFW you have to copy and paste something into R…
From time to time, you might need to copy and paste something into R and turn it into a character string. Maybe it’s something from the output of an error message, or from someone else’s malformed data, or something copied from a document or the internet. If it’s something small, then it’s usually OK to just manually insert "" around the strings and , between them. For something large, that’s just a nightmare.
For example, I ran into the global variables problem (again) recently with a package I was making. Only this time, it wasn’t the "." from a dplyr-style pipe chain that was giving me trouble, it was a ton of variables (You can see the mess here). Here’s a snippet of what I had to copy and paste:
senator_bills_details senator_commissions_date_joined
senator_commissions_name senator_date_of_birth senator_name
senator_office_address senator_party_date_joined senator_party_name
senator_positions_commission_date_start senator_suplente_name
senator_titular_name senator_vote session_date session_description
session_number session_type sigla sit_description situation_date
situation_place sponsor_abbr sponsor_name sponsor_party topic_general
topic_specific unit_name update_date vote_date vote_secret
country_of_birth event_description event_type head id_rollcallSo what did I do? Well, a little hackiness with strsplit, gsub and cat got me sorted. First I put it all into a string:
x <- c("senator_bills_details senator_commissions_date_joined senator_commissions_name senator_date_of_birth senator_name senator_office_address senator_party_date_joined senator_party_name senator_positions_commission_date_start senator_suplente_name senator_titular_name senator_vote session_date session_description session_number session_type sigla sit_description situation_date situation_place sponsor_abbr sponsor_name sponsor_party topic_general topic_specific unit_name update_date vote_date vote_secret country_of_birth event_description event_type head id_rollcall")Then we can use strsplit and unlist to get a character vector of the variables:
x <- strsplit(x, split = " ")
x <- unlist(x)
x[1:5]## [1] "senator_bills_details" "senator_commissions_date_joined"
## [3] "\nsenator_commissions_name" "senator_date_of_birth"
## [5] "senator_name"As you can see, some of these were separated by " ", and others had "\n" (newline) between them. With gsub, we can easily take that out. Don’t forget \ is a special character in R and so needs to be escaped with another \:
x <- gsub("\\n", "", x)
x[1:5]## [1] "senator_bills_details" "senator_commissions_date_joined"
## [3] "senator_commissions_name" "senator_date_of_birth"
## [5] "senator_name"Ok, almost there. We could use print(x) and copy-and-paste the result into our desired result, but we would still have [1], [2] etc., and no commas between the terms. To get over this, we can use cat with its sep argument. ", " will insert quotation marks at the end of the words and a comma between them:
cat(x, sep = '", "')## senator_bills_details", "senator_commissions_date_joined", "senator_commissions_name", "senator_date_of_birth", "senator_name", "senator_office_address", "senator_party_date_joined", "senator_party_namesenator_positions_commission_date_start", "senator_suplente_namesenator_titular_name", "senator_vote", "session_date", "session_descriptionsession_number", "session_type", "sigla", "sit_description", "situation_datesituation_place", "sponsor_abbr", "sponsor_name", "sponsor_party", "topic_generaltopic_specific", "unit_name", "update_date", "vote_date", "vote_secretcountry_of_birth", "event_description", "event_type", "head", "id_rollcallThe only part left after this is to copy the output and place a comma at the start and the end. Irritating problem solved!