How to count the number of characters (or bytes or width)

From the documentation, nzchar() is a fast way to find out if elements of a character vector are non-empty strings. It returns TRUE for non-empty strings and FALSE for empty strings.

Not Empty Vector

# This is not empty
Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER")

[1] "/Users/ivelasq/Library/R/x86_64/4.3/library"

# This returns TRUE
nzchar(Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER"))

[1] TRUE

Empty Vector

# This is empty
Sys.getenv("test")

[1] ""

# This returns FALSE
nzchar(Sys.getenv("test"))

[1] FALSE

TIL: nzchar(). Super useful when working with environment variables in R.

also, #asciicast is amazing! install the GIF converter with remotes::install_github('r-lib/asciicast', ref = remotes::github_pull(24)) #rstats h/t @GaborCsardi pic.twitter.com/pCZQLCNaDl

— Isabella Velásquez (@ivelasq3) May 11, 2022