Counting Letters

[teresanitsche]

Hi everyone!

How do you count letters with R?

Our participants had to name toys. We wanted to know wether the toys the participants had seen more often had longer names than toys seen less.

So, here we are. Our professor told us that it's easy to let R count the letters (e.g. the participant named a toy "malm" and we want R to tell us that it has 4 letters). So far google wasn't very helpful. Does anybody know how to do that?

Greetings from Germany!

[Kill3rbee]

Try this

toy1 <- "girrafe"
toy2 <- "anaconda"
toy3 <- "hippopotamus"

nchar(toy1)
[1] 7

hope this helps

[teresanitsche]

Thank you very much for the quick response!

This is how our data looks like.

I need every single name to be replaced with a number and it doesn't work with nchar to count the entire table. But thank you so far!

[mishabalyasin]

You can try doing something like this:

dataset %>%
  dplyr::mutate_if(is.character, nchar)

However, it's better to provide us with a reproducible example (reprex) illustrating your issue. Take a look at this guide, to see how to create one:

FAQ: How to do a minimal reproducible example ( reprex ) for beginners

A minimal reproducible example consists of the following items: A minimal dataset, necessary to reproduce the issue The minimal runnable code necessary to reproduce the issue, which can be run on the given dataset, and including the necessary information on the used packages. Let's quickly go over each one of these with examples: Minimal Dataset (Sample Data) You need to provide a data frame that is small enough to be (reasonably) pasted on a post, but big enough to reproduce your issue. Let's say, as an example, that you are working with the iris data frame head(iris) #> Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species #> 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.…

[Kill3rbee]

Try this:

library(data.table)
test <- setDT(Pfad1) #if you are using dataframe

test <- test[,lapply(.SD, nchar)]

That should do it

To test it first:

library(data.table)
set.seed(12)
test<-data.table(NULL)
for(i in 1:10){
  test<-rbind(test,data.table(a=i,b=paste0(letters[sample(1:i)],collapse = "")))
}

#Everything
test<-test[,lapply(.SD, nchar)]

Hope that helps

[nathania]

To keep the original names, you can also modify @mishabalyasin's approach as follows.

library(tidyverse)

starwars %>% 
  select(name:eye_color) %>%
  mutate_at(vars(ends_with('color')), 
            list(len = ~str_length(.)))
#> # A tibble: 87 x 9
#>    name  height  mass hair_color skin_color eye_color hair_color_len
#>    <chr>  <int> <dbl> <chr>      <chr>      <chr>              <int>
#>  1 Luke…    172    77 blond      fair       blue                   5
#>  2 C-3PO    167    75 <NA>       gold       yellow                NA
#>  3 R2-D2     96    32 <NA>       white, bl… red                   NA
#>  4 Dart…    202   136 none       white      yellow                 4
#>  5 Leia…    150    49 brown      light      brown                  5
#>  6 Owen…    178   120 brown, gr… light      blue                  11
#>  7 Beru…    165    75 brown      light      blue                   5
#>  8 R5-D4     97    32 <NA>       white, red red                   NA
#>  9 Bigg…    183    84 black      light      brown                  5
#> 10 Obi-…    182    77 auburn, w… fair       blue-gray             13
#> # … with 77 more rows, and 2 more variables: skin_color_len <int>,
#> #   eye_color_len <int>

^{Created on 2019-06-18 by the reprex package (v0.3.0.9000)}