cat {base}R Documentation

Concatenate and Print

Description

Outputs the objects, concatenating the representations. cat performs much less conversion than print.

Usage

cat(... , file = "", sep = " ", fill = FALSE, labels = NULL,
    append = FALSE)

Arguments

... R objects (see Details for the types of objects allowed).
file A connection, or a character string naming the file to print to. If "" (the default), cat prints to the standard output connection, the console unless redirected by sink.
sep character string to insert between the objects to print.
fill a logical or (positive) numeric controlling how the output is broken into successive lines. If FALSE (default), only newlines created explicitly by "\n" are printed. Otherwise, the output is broken into lines with print width equal to the option width if fill is TRUE, or the value of fill if this is numeric. Non-positive fill values are ignored, with a warning.
labels character vector of labels for the lines printed. Ignored if fill is FALSE.
append logical. Only used if the argument file is the name of file (and not a connection or "|cmd"). If TRUE output will be appended to file; otherwise, it will overwrite the contents of file.

Details

cat is useful for producing output in user-defined functions. It converts its arguments to character strings, concatenates them, separating them by the given sep= string, and then outputs them.

No linefeeds are output unless explicitly requested by "\n" or if generated by filling (if argument fill is TRUE or numeric.)

Currently only atomic vectors (and so not lists) and names are handled. Character strings are output ‘as is’ (unlike print.default which escapes non-printable characters and backslash — use encodeString if you want to output encoded strings using cat). Other types of R object should be converted (e.g. by as.character or format) before being passed to cat.

cat converts numeric/complex elements in the same way as print (and not in the same way as as.character which is used by the S equivalent), so options "digits" and "scipen" are relevant. However, it uses the minimum field width necessary for each element, rather than the same field width for all elements.

Value

None (invisible NULL).

References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

See Also

print, format, and paste which concatenates into a string.

Examples

iter <- rpois(1, lambda=10)
## print an informative message
cat("iteration = ", iter <- iter + 1, "\n")

## 'fill' and label lines:
cat(paste(letters, 100* 1:26), fill = TRUE,
    labels = paste("{",1:10,"}:",sep=""))

[Package base version 2.4.1 Index]