Concatenate char vector with | separator

Question

I have a data structure containing char vectrors (see below). It's a bit messy as it came from json source.

I need to combine/concatenate to one big string with lat/long pairs seperated by | and lat/long values separated by comma with the names removed.

i.e."53.193418,-2881248|53.1905138631287,-2.89043889005541|etc.."

I've tried

piped.data<-unname(paste(b, sep="|", collapse=","))

This gets me so far as pairing the values with comma and removing the names.

I just need to add the pipe to the individual pairs

Any ideas?

dput(b)

structure(c("53.193418", "-2.881248", "53.1905138631287", "-2.89043889005541", 
"53.186744", "-2.890165", "53.189836", "-2.893896", "53.1884117", 
"-2.88802", "53.1902965", "-2.8919373", "53.1940384", "-2.8972299", 
"53.1934748", "-2.8814698", "53.1894004", "-2.8886692", "53.1916771", 
"-2.8846099"), .Names = c("location.coordinate.latitude", "location.coordinate.longitude", 
"location.coordinate.latitude", "location.coordinate.longitude", 
"location.coordinate.latitude", "location.coordinate.longitude", 
"location.coordinate.latitude", "location.coordinate.longitude", 
"location.coordinate.latitude", "location.coordinate.longitude", 
"location.coordinate.latitude", "location.coordinate.longitude", 
"location.coordinate.latitude", "location.coordinate.longitude", 
"location.coordinate.latitude", "location.coordinate.longitude", 
"location.coordinate.latitude", "location.coordinate.longitude", 
"location.coordinate.latitude", "location.coordinate.longitude"
))

Answer 1

I would convert your "b" to a 2-column matrix and paste with that:

apply(matrix(b, ncol = 2, byrow = TRUE), 1, paste, collapse = "|")
#  [1] "53.193418|-2.881248"              "53.1905138631287|-2.89043889005541"
#  [3] "53.186744|-2.890165"              "53.189836|-2.893896"               
#  [5] "53.1884117|-2.88802"              "53.1902965|-2.8919373"             
#  [7] "53.1940384|-2.8972299"            "53.1934748|-2.8814698"             
#  [9] "53.1894004|-2.8886692"            "53.1916771|-2.8846099" 

Edit

I guess I misread your question.

If it's a single long string you want, first separated by a comma, and then by a pipe, you'll need paste twice:

paste(apply(matrix(b, ncol = 2, byrow = TRUE), 1, paste, collapse = ","), 
      collapse = "|")