nchar and substring in R Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Using nchar and substring in R

📖 Scenario: You work in a library and have a list of book titles. You want to find out how long each title is and extract a part of each title to create short labels.

🎯 Goal: Build a small R program that calculates the length of each book title using nchar and extracts the first 5 characters of each title using substring.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a vector called book_titles with exactly these titles: "Data Science Basics", "R Programming", "Statistics 101"

Create a variable called title_lengths that stores the length of each title using nchar

Create a variable called short_labels that stores the first 5 characters of each title using substring

Print the title_lengths and short_labels variables

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Libraries, bookstores, or any place with lists of names or titles often need to measure string lengths and create short labels for display.

💼 Career

Knowing how to manipulate strings is essential for data cleaning, reporting, and user interface design in many programming and data analysis jobs.

1

Create the book titles vector

Create a vector called book_titles with these exact strings: "Data Science Basics", "R Programming", "Statistics 101"

R Programming

# Create the vector book_titles with the given titles
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the c() function to create a vector with the exact titles.

2

Calculate the length of each title

Create a variable called title_lengths that stores the length of each title in book_titles using the nchar function

R Programming

book_titles <- c("Data Science Basics", "R Programming", "Statistics 101")
# Calculate the length of each title using nchar and store in title_lengths
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use nchar(book_titles) to get the length of each string in the vector.

3

Extract the first 5 characters of each title

Create a variable called short_labels that stores the first 5 characters of each title in book_titles using the substring function

R Programming

book_titles <- c("Data Science Basics", "R Programming", "Statistics 101")
title_lengths <- nchar(book_titles)
# Extract first 5 characters of each title using substring and store in short_labels
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use substring(book_titles, 1, 5) to get the first 5 characters of each string.

4

Print the results

Print the variables title_lengths and short_labels to display the lengths and short labels of the book titles

R Programming

book_titles <- c("Data Science Basics", "R Programming", "Statistics 101")
title_lengths <- nchar(book_titles)
short_labels <- substring(book_titles, 1, 5)
# Print title_lengths and short_labels
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(title_lengths) and print(short_labels) to show the results.