How to find the length of a string in R

Question

How to find the length of a string (i.e., number of characters in a string) without splitting it in R? I know how to find the length of a list but not of a string.

And what about Unicode strings? How do I find the length (in bytes) and the number of characters (runes, symbols) in a Unicode string?

Related Question:

• How to find the "real" number of characters in a Unicode string in R

Answer 1

See ?nchar. For example:

> nchar("foo") [1] 3 > set.seed(10) > strn <- paste(sample(LETTERS, 10), collapse = "") > strn [1] "NHKPBEFTLY" > nchar(strn) [1] 10 

Answer 2

Use stringi package and stri_length function

> stri_length(c("ala ma kota","ABC",NA)) [1] 11  3 NA 

Why? Because it is the FASTEST among presented solutions :)

require(microbenchmark) require(stringi) require(stringr) x <- c(letters,NA,paste(sample(letters,2000,TRUE),collapse=" ")) microbenchmark(nchar(x),str_length(x),stri_length(x)) Unit: microseconds            expr    min     lq  median      uq     max neval        nchar(x) 11.868 12.776 13.1590 13.6475  41.815   100   str_length(x) 30.715 33.159 33.6825 34.1360 173.400   100  stri_length(x)  2.653  3.281  4.0495  4.5380  19.966   100 

and also works fine with NA's

nchar(NA) ## [1] 2 stri_length(NA) ## [1] NA 

EDIT 2021

NA argument is no longer valid if you are using latest R version.