Is there a way to paste together the elements of a vector in R without using a loop?

Question

Say there's a vector x:

x <- c("a", " ", "b") 

and I want to quickly turn this into a single string "a b". Is there a way to do this without a loop? I know with a loop I could do this:

y <- "" for (i in 1:3){     paste(y, x[i], sep = "") }  > y [1] "a b" 

but I will need to do this over many, many iterations, and having to loop over this and replace the original with the new each time would become very time consuming. I always want to be able to do something like this:

x <- paste(x) 

as if paste() could smartly divide up the elements of a vector itself, but I know it can't. Is there another function, or a more creative way to use paste(), which can accomplish this efficiently?

Answer 1

Just adding a tidyverse way to provide an alternative to using paste():

library(glue) x <- c("a", " ", "b") glue_collapse(x) #> a b 

^{Created on 2020-10-31 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

Answer 2

You just need to use the collapse argument:

paste(x,collapse="")