How to Get the Length of a String in R

If you would like to loop through a string or check your word count for grad school, you will need to know the length of a string. In this article, we will learn how to get the length of a string in R.

There are two methods to get the length of a string in R. You can use the nchar or length method.

nchar("Astrid")
#> [1] 6

You can also use nchar on a vector of strings and it will return the length of each string.

names = c("Astrid", "Bodil")
nchar(names)

#> [1] 6 5

We can also use the length function to get the character count. However, we can not use the length function on a vector in the same way. It will return the length of the vector, not the length of each string.

length("Astrid")
#> [1] 6

names = c("Astrid", "Bodil")
length(names)

#> [1] 2