Creating a comma separated vector

Question

I have a numeric vector, one, which I'm trying to turn into a character vector where each element is separated by commas.

> one = c(1:5) > paste(as.character(one), collapse=", ") [1] "1, 2, 3, 4, 5" > paste(as.character(one), sep="' '", collapse=", ") [1] "1, 2, 3, 4, 5" 

However, I want the output to look like:

"1", "2", "3", "4", "5"  

Am I missing some parameter from the paste function? Help!?

Answer 1

shQuote is probably the best way to do this. Specifically, this gets you the output you want:

cat(paste(shQuote(one, type="cmd"), collapse=", ")) 

If single quotes are fine, you can use:

paste(shQuote(one), collapse=", ") 

type="cmd" actually provides escaped quotes, which is what's actually useful for most contexts, but if you really want to display it somewhere with unescaped quotes, cat provides that.

Answer 2

You say you want a character vector with that output, but others who find this question may be looking for one of these functions instead:

First, a way to get output ready for input to R; that would be dput:

> dput(as.character(one)) c("1", "2", "3", "4", "5") 

Second, a way to output a csv file, which would be write.csv or write.table. These functions take a parameter file, not used here, to directly output to a file.

> write.table(matrix(as.character(one),nrow=1), sep=",",               row.names=FALSE, col.names=FALSE) "1","2","3","4","5"  > write.csv(matrix(as.character(one),nrow=1),row.names=FALSE) "V1","V2","V3","V4","V5" "1","2","3","4","5"