Definition

• A character is a written language - anything you can enter on a key board
  • eg: 'Q' '*' '+' ',' '{'
• A string is a sequence of characters
  • eg: 'Columbia University' 'cat, squirrel, hedgehog'
• using mode to identify the type character

summary:

• nchar(): Finds the length of a string.
• substring(): Extracts substrings and substitutes.
• strsplit(): Turns strings into vectors.
• paste(): Turns vectors into a string.
• grep(): Search for patterns in a string.

Whitespace

• ' ': whitespace is considered a character and mulitple spaces ' ' a string

mode(" ")
# return: "character"

nchar(" "); nchar("  "); nchar("");
# the number of characters here is:
# 1         2             0

String as elements of a vector

If strings are elements of an object,

• length() reports the number of strings in the object, not the number of characters in the string.
• nchar() reports the number of character values in a string.