List of unique characters in a column

Question

I am trying to figure out how to extract all the unique characters from a certain column. For example, if one of my column has the following rows,

june  
july&  
august%

then I would like r to give me the list of all the unique characters, i.e,

junely&agst%

How can this be done in R?

@Dr.Flow that would just return all values from the sample data... — Wimpel, Jul 14 '20 at 12:13
Including special characters yes. But is there a way to seprate just special characters? — Salahuddin, Jul 14 '20 at 12:30

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 14 '20 at 12:11

3

Split the column values at each character and paste only unique characters.

x <- c('june', 'july&', 'august%')
paste0(unique(unlist(strsplit(x, ''))), collapse = "")
#[1] "junely&agst%"

answered Jul 14 '20 at 12:11

Ronak Shah

377,200
20
156
213

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 14 '20 at 12:39

May be a Tidy approach will be useful:

library(dplyr)
library(purrr)
library(stringr)

# input
x <- c("june", "july&", "august%")
expected <- "junely&agst%"


# modify
actual <- x %>% str_split(pattern = "") %>% flatten_chr %>% unique %>% paste0(collapse = "")


# validate
stopifnot(actual == expected)

List of unique characters in a column

2 Answers2