paste adjacent elements matching string

Try this which assumes that comma does not appear in any of the strings.
You can substitute a different non-appearing character if a comma does
appear in any of the strings:

strsplit(gsub("string,", "string", paste(vec, collapse = ",")), ",")[[1]]

It first runs all the strings together into a single comma-separate string
using paste and then replaces each occurrence of "string," with "string"
using gsub.  Finally it breaks the long string back up into individual
strings using strsplit.

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 8:42 PM, Jill Hollenbach
<jillah at sbcglobal.net>wrote:

Hi all,
I would like to combine elements of a vector:

vec <- c("astring",  "b", "cstring",  "d", "e")

 > vec

[1] "astring" "b"       "cstring" "d"       "e"

such that for every element that contains  "string" at the end, it is
combined with the next element, so that I get this:

 > res

[1] "astringb" "cstringd" "e"

Any help is much appreciated, still learning.

Many thanks,
Jill

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]