Concatenating N columns of text in R

Question

I have an arbitrary number of columns containing text data that have been assembled using the cbind() command, for example:

[1,] "Text 1,1" "Text 1,2" "Text 1,n"
[2,] "Text 2,1" "Text 2,2" "Text 2,n"
[3,] "Text 3,1" "Text 3,2" "Text 3,n"
[n,] "Text n,1" "Text n,2" "Text n,n"

I want to concatenate each row together, so I'm left with:

[1,] "Text 1,1 Text 1,2 Text 1,n"
[n,] "Text n,1 Text n,2 Text n,n"

Currently, I'm doing this using a for loop (where textColumns is the cbind() matrix):

concatColumn <- c()
for (i in 1:ncol(textColumns)) concatColumn <- paste(concatColumn,textColumns[,i])

Is there a simpler, more elegant way to do this in R? I've been looking around for ways to do this using the paste() command without a for loop, but haven't been able to find a solution. Thank you in advance for your help!

Answer 1

It's easy with a data.frame,

m = matrix(letters[1:12], 3, byrow=TRUE)
do.call(paste, as.data.frame(m, stringsAsFactors=FALSE))
#[1] "a b c d" "e f g h" "i j k l"

Answer 2

Just use paste with its collapse argument:

R> row <- c("Text 1,1",  "Text 1,2", "Text 1,n")
R> paste(row, collapse=" ")
[1] "Text 1,1 Text 1,2 Text 1,n"
R> 

paste is vectorised, so you can feed it multiple arguments at once.