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% File src/library/base/man/nchar.Rd
% Part of the R package, http://www.R-project.org
% Copyright 1995-2010 R Core Development Team
% Distributed under GPL 2 or later

\name{nchar}
\alias{nchar}
\alias{nzchar}
\title{Count the Number of Characters (or Bytes or Width)}
\usage{
nchar(x, type = "chars", allowNA = FALSE)

nzchar(x)
}
\description{
  \code{nchar} takes a character vector as an argument and
  returns a vector whose elements contain the sizes of
  the corresponding elements of \code{x}.

  \code{nzchar} is a fast way to find out if elements of a character
  vector are non-empty strings.
}
\arguments{
  \item{x}{character vector, or a vector to be coerced to a character
    vector.}
  \item{type}{character string: partial matching to one of
    \code{c("bytes", "chars", "width")}.  See \sQuote{Details}.}
  \item{allowNA}{logical: should \code{NA} be returned for invalid
    multibyte strings or \code{"bytes"}-encoded strings (rather than
    throwing an error)?}
}
\details{
  The \sQuote{size} of a character string can be measured in one of
  three ways
  \describe{
    \item{\code{bytes}}{The number of bytes needed to store the string
      (plus in C a final terminator which is not counted).}
    \item{\code{chars}}{The number of human-readable characters.}
    \item{\code{width}}{The number of columns \code{cat} will use to
      print the string in a monospaced font.  The same as \code{chars}
      if this cannot be calculated.}
  }
  These will often be the same, and almost always will be in single-byte
  locales.  There will be differences between the first two with
  multibyte character sequences, e.g. in UTF-8 locales.

  The internal equivalent of the default method of
  \code{\link{as.character}} is performed on \code{x} (so there is no
  method dispatch).  If you want to operate on non-vector objects
  passing them through \code{\link{deparse}} first will be required.
}
\value{
  For \code{nchar}, an integer vector giving the sizes of each element,
  currently always \code{2} for missing values (for \code{NA}).

  If \code{allowNA = TRUE} and an element is invalid in a multi-byte
  character set such as UTF-8, its number of characters and the width
  will be \code{NA}.  Otherwise the number of characters will be
  non-negative, so \code{!is.na(nchar(x, "chars", TRUE))} is a test of
  validity.

  A character string marked with \code{"bytes"} encoding has a number of
  bytes, but neither a known number of characters nor a width, so the
  latter two types are \code{NA} if \code{allowNA = TRUE}, otherwise an
  error.

  Names, dims and dimnames are copied from the input.

  For \code{nzchar}, a logical vector of the same length as \code{x},
  true if and only if the element has non-zero length.
}
\note{
  This does \strong{not} by default give the number of characters that
  will be used to \code{print()} the string.  Use
  \code{\link{encodeString}} to find the characters used to print the
  string.
#ifdef windows
  This is particularly important on Windows when \samp{\\uxxxx}
  sequences have been used to enter Unicode characters not representable
  in the current encoding.  Thus \code{nchar("\\u2642")} is \code{1},
  and it is printed in \code{Rgui} as one character, but it will be
  printed in \code{Rterm} as \code{<U+2642>}, which is what
  \code{encodeString} gives.
#endif
#ifdef unix
  Where character strings have been marked as UTF-8, the number of
  characters and widths will be computed in UTF-8, even though printing
  may use escapes such as \samp{<U+2642>} in a non-UTF-8 locale.
#endif
}
\references{
  Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988)
  \emph{The New S Language}.
  Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.
}
\seealso{
  \code{\link{strwidth}} giving width of strings for plotting;
  \code{\link{paste}}, \code{\link{substr}}, \code{\link{strsplit}}
}
\examples{
x <- c("asfef", "qwerty", "yuiop[", "b", "stuff.blah.yech")
nchar(x)
# 5  6  6  1 15

nchar(deparse(mean))
# 18 17
}
\keyword{character}