Length of a Vector vs. Length of a String

It is important to distinguish two fundamental concepts, the length of a string vector, and the length of the string itself. The length of a vector refers to the number of elements in that vector. In the following example, we have created a vector of length 3.

x <- c("apple", "banana", "cherry")length(x)

Output:
[1] 3

In contrast, the length of a string refers to the number of characters (e.g., letters, digits, whitespace, special characters) in that specific string, which can be counted by the stringr function str_length().

library(stringr)
# a single element in the vectorstr_length(c("It's a book"))

Output:
[1] 11

# multiple elements in the vectorstr_length(c("a", "bcd", "ef", "It's a book"))

Output:
[1]  1  3  2 11

str_length() is equivalent to the base R function nchar().

nchar(c("a", "bc", "def"))

Output:
[1] 1 2 3