https://github.com/jonocarroll/charcuterie
Handle Strings as Vectors of Characters
https://github.com/jonocarroll/charcuterie
Last synced: 30 days ago
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Handle Strings as Vectors of Characters
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/jonocarroll/charcuterie
- Owner: jonocarroll
- License: other
- Created: 2024-08-02T14:07:24.000Z (9 months ago)
- Default Branch: main
- Last Pushed: 2024-11-07T21:30:54.000Z (5 months ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-03-09T20:34:32.230Z (about 1 month ago)
- Language: R
- Homepage: https://jonocarroll.github.io/charcuterie/
- Size: 1.27 MB
- Stars: 26
- Watchers: 2
- Forks: 1
- Open Issues: 0
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.Rmd
- Changelog: NEWS.md
- License: LICENSE
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README
---
output: github_document
editor_options:
chunk_output_type: console
---
```{r, include = FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
collapse = TRUE,
comment = "#>",
fig.path = "man/figures/README-",
out.width = "100%"
)
```
# charcuterie 
The goal of {charcuterie} is to finally have strings as iterable character vectors.
## Installation
You can install the published version from CRAN with
``` r
install.packages("charcuterie")
```
You can install the development version with
``` r
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("jonocarroll/charcuterie")
```
## Motivation
See this blog post: https://jcarroll.com.au/2024/08/03/charcuterie-what-if-strings-were-iterable-in-r/
Most programming languages seem to treat a string as an array of characters, but
not R, where a "string" is an object of type "character" which has a length of 1.
The number of 'characters' in a string is obtained via `nchar(x)` but otherwise,
the individual 'characters' comprising the string are rarely exposed.
The most common route around this limitation is to split the string into smaller
strings, each containing a single character, i.e.
```{r}
strsplit("string", split = "")
```
which produces a list of strings, each a single character. This is cumbersome to
type out, so this package offers a cleaner approach (which does the above all
the same)
```{r}
library(charcuterie)
s <- chars("string")
s
```
This _looks like_ it did nothing, but that's the point - it still looks like a
"string". It's actually a vector, though
```{r}
unclass(s)
```
## Example Usage
This means you can finally do vector things with it, like reverse it
```{r}
rev(s)
```
or sort it
```{r}
sort(s)
```
or index into it
```{r}
s[3]
```
or count elements
```{r}
count(chars("strawberry"), "r")
```
{charcuterie} defines S3 methods of functions for a wide range of operations to
be performed on a string built from a vector of characters
- index with `[`
- concatenate with `c`
- print with `format` and `print`
- slice with `head` and `tail`
- reverse with `rev`
- sort with `sort`
- set operations with `setdiff`, `union`, `intersect`, and a new `except`
- leverage existing vectorised operations like `unique`, `toupper`, and `tolower`
For more detailed usage examples, see the vignettes.