how to create a vector of blank spaces of different sizes in R-CodePudding

I have a vector of "sizes" or "widths", like this one:

x <- c(1, 4, 6, 10)

and I would like to create another vector based on x, a vector like this one:

y <- c(" ", "    ", "      ", "          ")

Basically there are two imputs for creating y: the blank space " " and the vector x.

So as you can see, the vector x defines the length of the blank spaces in y. I know I can do this creating a function from scratch, but I'm guessing if there's some kind of function or combination with rep, paste0 or other built in functions in R.

Any idea? thanks.

CodePudding user response：

Use strrep:

strrep(" ", c(1, 4, 6, 10))
#> [1] " "          "    "       "      "     "          "

In stringr, you can also use str_dup:

stringr::str_dup(" ", c(1, 4, 6, 10))
#> [1] " "          "    "       "      "     "          "

CodePudding user response：

A possible solution:

x <- c(1, 4, 6, 10)

sapply(x, \(y) paste0(rep(" ", y), collapse = ""))

#> [1] " "          "    "       "      "     "          "

CodePudding user response：

Here is a solution.

x <- c(1, 4, 6, 10)
y <- sapply(x, \(n) formatC(" ", width = n))
y
#> [1] " "          "    "       "      "     "          "

^{Created on 2022-08-09 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}

CodePudding user response：

library(stringr)

x <- c(1, 4, 6, 10)

y <- str_pad(" ", width = x)

y
#> [1] " "          "    "       "      "     "          "

^{Created on 2022-08-09 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}