Pad a String with White Space to a Fixed Length

str_pad() adds white space (or other characters) to a string so that it becomes a fixed length (or said width). By default, white space is added to the left side of the string. In the following example, 4 spaces are added before “a”, and 2 before “bee”, so that each padded string element is of length 5.

library(stringr)hive <- c("a", "bee")str_pad(hive, width = 5) # width of resulted string 

Output:
[1] "    a" "  bee"

Here we pad with “-” at both sides of each string.

str_pad(hive, width = 5,         side = "both", pad = "-")

Output:
[1] "--a--" "-bee-"

We can use vectorized arguments to pad string elements into different length and with different characters.

str_pad(hive, width = c(4, 6),         side = "both", pad = c("-", "*"))

Output:
[1] "-a--"   "*bee**"

If the original string element is longer than the specified width value, the original string will remain the same; it will not be truncated.

str_pad(c(hive, "beeees"), width = 5,         side = "both", pad = "-")

Output:
[1] "--a--"  "-bee-"  "beeees"