make.unique: Make Character Strings Unique
In robertzk/monadicbase: The R Base Package

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Author(s) See Also Examples

Makes the elements of a character vector unique by appending sequence numbers to duplicates.

1	make.unique(names, sep = ".")

`names`	a character vector
`sep`	a character string used to separate a duplicate name from its sequence number.

The algorithm used by make.unique has the property that make.unique(c(A, B)) == make.unique(c(make.unique(A), B)).

In other words, you can append one string at a time to a vector, making it unique each time, and get the same result as applying make.unique to all of the strings at once.

If character vector A is already unique, then make.unique(c(A, B)) preserves A.

A character vector of same length as names with duplicates changed, in the current locale's encoding.

Thomas P. Minka

make.names

make.unique(c("a", "a", "a"))
make.unique(c(make.unique(c("a", "a")), "a"))

make.unique(c("a", "a", "a.2", "a"))
make.unique(c(make.unique(c("a", "a")), "a.2", "a"))

rbind(data.frame(x = 1), data.frame(x = 2), data.frame(x = 3))
rbind(rbind(data.frame(x = 1), data.frame(x = 2)), data.frame(x = 3))