Cast symbol to string
as_string() converts symbols to character strings.
as_string(x)
x |
A string or symbol. If a string, the attributes are removed, if any. |
A character vector of length 1.
Unlike base::as.symbol() and base::as.name(), as_string()
automatically transforms unicode tags such as "<U+5E78>" to the
proper UTF-8 character. This is important on Windows because:
R on Windows has no UTF-8 support, and uses native encoding instead.
The native encodings do not cover all Unicode characters. For example, Western encodings do not support CKJ characters.
When a lossy UTF-8 -> native transformation occurs, uncovered
characters are transformed to an ASCII unicode tag like "<U+5E78>".
Symbols are always encoded in native. This means that transforming the column names of a data frame to symbols might be a lossy operation.
This operation is very common in the tidyverse because of data masking APIs like dplyr where data frames are transformed to environments. While the names of a data frame are stored as a character vector, the bindings of environments are stored as symbols.
Because it reencodes the ASCII unicode tags to their UTF-8
representation, the string -> symbol -> string roundtrip is
more stable with as_string().
as_name() for a higher-level variant of as_string()
that automatically unwraps quosures.
# Let's create some symbols:
foo <- quote(foo)
bar <- sym("bar")
# as_string() converts symbols to strings:
foo
as_string(foo)
typeof(bar)
typeof(as_string(bar))Please choose more modern alternatives, such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.