How to get the length of elements in a character vector in R?

Question

Below, I expected that length(group.name) would return 3. But it just returns 1. Is there a Base R solution to get the number of elements of a character vector?

group.name = c("bigii, ggigi, ciggi")
length(group.name)
#[1] 1

Answer 1

An option would be to count the words with str_count

library(stringr)
str_count(group.name, "\\w+")
#[1] 3

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Or replace all the non-delimiters to blank, use nchar to get the number of characters, add 1 (as the delimiter is 1 less than the number of words)

nchar(gsub("[^,]+", "", group.name)) + 1
#[1] 3

Or using regexpr

lengths(gregexpr("\\w+", group.name))
#[1] 3

It can be turned into a function

f1 <- function(stringObj){

  nchar(gsub("[^,]+", "", stringObj)) + 1
 }

f1(group.name)
#[1] 3

Answer 2

group.name is a single string. I think you are looking to count every word differently separated by comma, you could do that by splitting on comma and then count it's length

length(strsplit(group.name, ",")[[1]])
#[1] 3