Add single quotes to a string

Question

I try to add single quotes to a string but don't see how to do it. For instance I would like to replace ABC by 'ABC'.

I have played with paste, cat, print but don't see how to do it.

Any solution?

Thanks, Vincent

Olfactory

Answer 1

Just use paste:

R> paste("'", "ABC", "'", sep="")
[1] "'ABC'"

or the new variety

R> paste0("'", "ABC", "'")
[1] "'ABC'"

Devaluate

Answer 2

Maybe use sQuote?

sQuote("ABC")
# [1] "'ABC'"

This (like its sibling dQuote) is frequently used to put quotes around some message or other text that's being printed to the console:

cat("ABC", "\n")
# ABC 
cat(sQuote("ABC"), "\n")
# 'ABC' 

Do note (as is documented in ?sQuote) that, depending on the type of quotes needed for your task, you may need to first reset options("useFancyQuotes"). To ensure that the function decorates your text with simple upright ASCII quotes, for example, do the following:

options(useFancyQuotes = FALSE)
sQuote("ABC")
# [1] "'ABC'"

Poi

Wow, my default option was to use fancyQuotes on OS X and i ended up with weird quotes... :) – Savanna

So cool! R has the be amongst the coolest languages out there if not THE coolest. – Pint

Problem with sQuote it seems is it uses a different character ‘abc’ . But what we would actually need would be 'abc'. When run sql it sQuote gives error – Waterside

@Waterside -- You can get the plain quotes you want by first setting options(useFancyQuotes = FALSE). (See ?sQuote for some additional options.) – Periosteum

Answer 3

Extending @vodka answer:

s <- c("cat", "dog")
a <- "'"
mapply(paste0, a, s, a)

Exocarp

Answer 4

Using Reduce and paste0

Reduce(paste0,list("'","a","'"))
 [1] "'a'"

Malvern

Answer 5

Maybe I'm missing something:

s <- "cat"
a <- "'"
paste(a,s,a,sep="")

Expansionism

Thx. I used collapse instead of sep. – Olfactory

Answer 6

With sprintf():

x <- c("paste", "cat", "print")

sprintf("'%s'", x)
# [1] "'paste'" "'cat'"   "'print'"

Disarticulate