R - do I need to add explicit new line character with print()?

r printing newline
MadSeb picture MadSeb · Feb 16, 2012 · Viewed 198.6k times · Source

How do I use the new line character in R? 

myStringVariable <- "Very Nice ! I like";

myStringVariabel <- paste(myStringVariable, "\n", sep="");

The above code DOESN'T work

P.S There's significant challenges when googling this kind of stuff since the query "R new line character" does seem to confuse google. I really wish R had a different name.

Answer

David Robinson picture David Robinson · Feb 16, 2012

The nature of R means that you're never going to have a newline in a character vector when you simply print it out.

> print("hello\nworld\n")
[1] "hello\nworld\n"

That is, the newlines are in the string, they just don't get printed as new lines. However, you can use other functions if you want to print them, such as cat:

> cat("hello\nworld\n")
hello
world

Related questions

Print string and variable contents on the same line in R

Is there a way to print text and variable contents on the same line? For example, wd <- getwd() print("Current working dir: ", wd) I couldn't find anything about the syntax that would allow me to do this.

Read More
Removing display of row names from data frame

I am creating a dataframe using this code: df <- data.frame(dbGetQuery(con, paste('select * from test'))) Which results in this: UID BuildingCode AccessTime 1 123456 BUILD-1 2014-06-16 07:00:00 2 364952 BUILD-2 2014-06-15 08:00:00 3 95865 BUILD-1 2014-06-06 09:50:00 I am then trying to …

Read More
Why do R objects not print in a function or a "for" loop?

I have an R matrix named ddd. When I enter this, everything works fine: i <- 1 shapiro.test(ddd[,y]) ad.test(ddd[,y]) stem(ddd[,y]) print(y) The calls to Shapiro Wilk, Anderson Darling, and stem all …

Read More