Creating a sequential list of letters with R

r alphabet
Brandon Bertelsen picture Brandon Bertelsen · Sep 17, 2009 · Viewed 95.3k times · Source

I would like to be able to create a sequence of letters in R (to assist in importing data from a SPSS file)

It's quite easy to create a sequence of numbers, for example:

seq(1,1000)
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 ... 1000

paste("something_",1:12,sep="")
[1] something1 something2 ... something12

But is there any functionality for appending, pasting, or creating sequences of letters like this? 

paste("This_",a:z,sep="")
[1]This_a This_b This_c ... This_4z

Thanks in advance!

Answer

Christopher DuBois picture Christopher DuBois · Sep 17, 2009

This is what you're looking for:

> paste("This_", letters, sep="")

> [1] "This_a" "This_b" "This_c" "This_d" "This_e" "This_f" "This_g" "This_h"
  [9] "This_i" "This_j" "This_k" "This_l" "This_m" "This_n" "This_o" "This_p"
  [17] "This_q" "This_r" "This_s" "This_t" "This_u" "This_v" "This_w" "This_x"
  [25] "This_y" "This_z"

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