Functions in concatenate construct human-friendly text from elements whose values aren't known in advance, as in calls to message, warning or stop.
Each function in concatenate returns a comma-separated string. (A length-one character vector.) The workhorse function in concatenate is cc.
cc("one fish", "two fish")
#> [1] "one fish, two fish"Its wrappers cc_or and cc_and insert "or" and "and" between the last two elements of the input. This is cleaner than wrestling with paste.
cc_and("this", "that", "the other")
#> [1] "this, that and the other"
cc_or("one way", "another")
#> [1] "one way or another"cn and its derivatives combine these functions with sprintf-like substitution and the grammatical number awareness of ngettext.
Like ngettext, the cn functions return different strings depending on the number of the object, and two substitutions are made sprintf-style:
- "
%c": the comma-concatenated values of the object, as incc - "
%n": the number of the object
This encourages verbose user-facing messages from clean code.
x <- unique(iris$Species)
cn_and(x, "a single species: %c", "%n unique species: %c")
#> [1] "3 unique species: setosa, versicolor and virginica"There are row-wise data.frame methods for the cn functions.
singular <- "%n row: %c"
plural <- "%n rows whose values are %c"
cn(chickwts[1, ], singular, plural)
#> [1] "1 row: 179, horsebean"
cn_and(chickwts[1:3, 1, drop = FALSE], singular, plural)
#> [1] "3 rows whose values are 179, 160 and 136"The cc functions are also available as binary infix operators.
x <- "important value"
x %c% "!"
#> [1] "important value!"concatenate is available via CRAN.
install.packages("concatenate")
Or, get it from GitHub.
devtools::install_github("jamesdunham/concatenate")