Character vectors in R are used to store text data. You previously learned that in contrast with many other programming languages, a character vector is not a vector of single characters, letters, or alphabet symbols such as a, b, c. Rather, it is a vector of strings.
R also provides a variety of built-in functions to deal with character vectors. Many of them also perform vectorized operations so they can process numerous string values in one step.
In this section, you will learn more about printing, combining, and transforming texts stored in character vectors.
Perhaps the most basic thing we can do with texts is to view them. R provides several ways to view texts in the console.
The simplest way is to directly type the string in quotation marks:
"Hello" ## [1] "Hello"
Like a numeric vector of floating numbers, a character vector is a vector of character values, or strings. Hello is in the first position and is the only element of the character...