Using toString function in R

Question

I have numeric objects a=1,b=2,c=3,d=4. Now when I use :

toString(c(a,b,c,d))

I get:

"1, 2, 3, 4"

as the output. How do I get rid of the comma? I want "1234" as the output. Or is there another way to do this?

Answer 1

Just use paste or paste0:

a <- 1; b <- 2; c <- 3; d <- 4
paste0(a, b, c, d)
# [1] "1234"
paste(a, b, c, d, sep="")
# [1] "1234"

---

You cannot get the result directly from toString even though toString uses paste under the hood:

toString.default
# function (x, width = NULL, ...) 
# {
#     string <- paste(x, collapse = ", ")
# --- function continues ---

Compare that behavior with:

paste(c(a, b, c, d), collapse = ", ")
# [1] "1, 2, 3, 4"

Since it is hard-coded, if you really wanted to use toString, you would have to then use sub/gsub to remove the "," after you used toString, but that seems inefficient to me.