Unite multiple character columns into one

Convenience function for combining character columns.

Usage

unite_str(data, col, ..., sep = ". ", remove = TRUE)

Arguments

data

A data frame.

col

The name of the new column, as a string or symbol.

This argument is passed by expression and supports quasiquotation (you can unquote strings and symbols). The name is captured from the expression with rlang::ensym() (note that this kind of interface where symbols do not represent actual objects is now discouraged in the tidyverse; we support it here for backward compatibility).

...

<tidy-select> Columns to unite

sep

Separator to use between values.

remove

If TRUE, remove input columns from output data frame.

Value

The original data frame with the one or more columns combined as character vectors separated by a period.

Details

Blank values of "" are converted into missing values.

Examples

data <- tibble::tibble(x = c("good", "Saw fish.", "", NA), y = c("2021", NA, NA, NA))

# unite has poor handling of character vectors
tidyr::unite(data, "new", x, y, remove = FALSE)
#> # A tibble: 4 × 3
#>   new          x           y    
#>   <chr>        <chr>       <chr>
#> 1 good_2021    "good"      2021 
#> 2 Saw fish._NA "Saw fish." NA   
#> 3 _NA          ""          NA   
#> 4 NA_NA         NA         NA   

unite_str(data, "new", x, y, remove = FALSE)
#> # A tibble: 4 × 3
#>   new        x         y    
#>   <chr>      <chr>     <chr>
#> 1 good. 2021 good      2021 
#> 2 Saw fish.  Saw fish. NA   
#> 3 NA         NA        NA   
#> 4 NA         NA        NA