R Programming: Automating Merge of Character Strings

Question

Hi there,

I'm trying to automate some of the systems at work here specifically to do with report generation based on survey data.

Lets say i have 3 comments for 1 question.

current_comments <- c("too slow", "not fast enough", "bad speed")

Basically what i want to do is merge the comments into one string separated by a "-" too look like this

>current_comments
[1] "too slow - not fast enough - bad speed"

So that i can stick it into one cell for exporting.

I know that i can do this by using the paste function.

> paste(current_comments[1], " - ", current_comments[2], " - ", current_comments[3])
[1] "too slow  -  not fast enough  -  bad speed"

But from an automation standpoint how would i do this with a varying number of comments.

Sorry for a newbie question but this has had me stumped for the better part of a afternoon.

edit: as requested heres dput(head(clean_data, 10)) with the names and the questions changed

ture(list(res_qnumber = 1:10, res_ID = c(44024431L, 44024431L, 
44024431L, 44024431L, 44024431L, 44024431L, 44024431L, 44024431L, 
44024431L, 44024431L), res_name = c("name1", "name1", 
"name1", "name1", "name1", "name1", "name1", 
"name1", "name1", "name1"), res_pos = c("NA", 
"NA", "NA", "NA", "NA", "NA", "NA", "NA", "NA", "NA"), res_ceo = c(FALSE, 
FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE
), res_qtype = c("standard", "standard", "standard", "standard", 
"standard", "standard", "standard", "standard", "standard", "standard"
), res_qtext = c("Question1", 
"Question2", 
"Question3", 
"Question4", 
"Question5", 
"Question6", 
"Question7", 
"Question8", 
"Question9"
), res_response = c("2", "5", "5", "5", "5", "5", "5", "5", "5", 
"5"), res_comment = c("too slow", NA_character_, NA_character_, 
NA_character_, NA_character_, NA_character_, NA_character_, NA_character_, 
NA_character_, NA_character_), res_scale = c("scale1", "scale2", 
"scale3", "scale4", "scale5", "scale6", "scale7", "scale8", "scale9", 
"scale10")), .Names = c("res_qnumber", "res_ID", "res_name", 
"res_pos", "res_ceo", "res_qtype", "res_qtext", "res_response", 
"res_comment", "res_scale"), row.names = c(NA, 10L), class = "data.frame")

Answer 1

hi

paste(current_comments, collapse=" - ")