rep_char: Repeat a character a variable number of times
In brendan-r/brocks: The Personal R Functions of Brendan Rocks

Description Usage Arguments Value Author(s) Examples

Effectively a version of rep, where only once value can be repeated (by default, a space; " "), but it can be repeated a variable number of times. Useful for creating even spacing for print and summary methods.

1	rep_char(x = " ", times)

`x`	A value to repeat. Will be coerced to `character`.
`times`	A `numeric` `vector`; the number of times that `x` should be repeated.

A character vector of x repated various times

Brendan Rocks rocks.brendan@gmail.com

# Strings repeating 'a' a variable number of times!
rep_char("a", 1:5)

# Slightly more useful. Some text strings which we'd like to present:
desc <- c("\n", "first : 1st\n", "second : 2nd\n", "third : 3rd\n",
"fourth : 4th\n", "umpteenth : ...\n")

# However, the varying lengths make them look a little awkward
cat(desc)

# We can use rep_char to add extra spaces to the strings which are shorter
# than the longest
desc_spaced <- paste0(rep_char(times = max(nchar(desc)) - nchar(desc)), desc)

# Much better
cat(desc_spaced)