How count elements in an column that are not empty

Question

I just started with R, and i have to count elements from an column that are not empty. For example :

   exampleColumn
1 "heey"
2
3 "World"
4 "how are you "

How can I achieve this ?

Answer 1

If you want to count the strings that are not identical to the empty string (""), you can use:

sum(dat$exampleColumn != "")

Answer 2

@Sven definitely gave the right answer. If you were like me, wondering why

length(dat$exampleColumn != "")

does not work. It's because "length" counts all the TRUE/FALSE evaluations, but "sum" only sums up the TRUE values. A beginner's ah-ha moment!