R: How to expand a vector to a bigger length maintaining its unique values?

Question

Say we have a vector like the one below:

countries <- c("UK", "Germany", "Italy", "Denmark")

I would like to create another one out of this, but longer like the following one:

countries_long <- c("UK", "UK", "UK", "UK", "Germany", "Germany", "Italy", "Italy", "Denmark", "Denmark", "Denmark")

How could I achieve this outcome?

Answer 1

> rep(countries, c(4,2,2,3))
 [1] "UK"      "UK"      "UK"      "UK"      "Germany" "Germany" "Italy"   "Italy"   "Denmark" "Denmark" "Denmark"
>