I have a couple hundred institution names that I would like to reformat. Currently they are in a vector, with just the college name in the each observation.

Is there a way to output this so that each college has text quotes around each name (so that it appears like "State University"), and then separate each observation by a comma? I tried using the paste() command, but the quotation marks seemed to make it so that I couldn't quote the punctuation attended.

Desired plain text output using write() function would be something like:

"State University", "Private University", "State Rival"

Replicable example:

 state <- c("State University", "Private University", "Rival State")

CodePudding user response：

You can nest paste() to get what you want:

paste(paste("\"", state, "\"", sep = ""), collapse = ",")

The inner paste() quotes each element in your character vector, then the outer paste() joins / collapses the vector into one string.

If you have the package stringr installed, you can do it in one call:

library(stringr)
str_c("\"", state, "\"", collapse = ",")

CodePudding user response：

Using sprintf and toString to construct the string and writeLines to write the output to text file.

writeLines(toString(sprintf('"%s"', state)), "temp.txt")