Adjust the size of character strings

Source: R/adjustStrings.R

Adjust the size of character strings by adding extra characters. It allows to constraint the size of the string or to add a specific number of extra characters.

adjustStrings(
  x,
  n,
  extra = 0,
  align = c("right", "left", "center"),
  add = FALSE
)

Arguments

x

a character vector, or a vector to be coerced to a character vector.
n

a positive integer indicating the size of character strings to be created or added.
extra

a character vector, or a vector to be coerced to a character vector that will be (partially) added to produced a string of a specific length.
align

either "right", "left" or "center". If "right", then strings will be right-aligned and so extra's characters will be added to the left. "right" is the opposite of "left" and if align = "center", then extra characters will be split in half and added on both sides.
add

a logical should extra be added, in which case n characters will be added to input strings.

Value

A character vector of the concatenated characters.

Details

This function was originally created to help getting a fixed number of digits when naming files. The current version is more general, it allows to add any string before or after to adjust the size. Not that if a character is longer than expected, it will be adequately cut off.

See also

base::sprintf()

Examples

paste0('myfilename', adjustStrings(c(1:2,10,100), 3))

#> [1] "myfilename001" "myfilename002" "myfilename010" "myfilename100"
adjustStrings('# Comment ', 20, '#', align = "left")

#> [1] "# Comment ##########"