make.unique
Make Character Strings Unique

Description

Makes unique all elements of a character vector by appending sequence numbers to duplicates.

Usage

make.unique(names, sep = ".")

Arguments

names a vector of character strings.
sep a character string used as a separator between a duplicate string and the appended sequence number. The default is ".".

Details

If character vector A is already unique, then make.unique(c(A, B)) preserves A.
When you create unique row names for large data frames, Spotfire Enterprise Runtime for R allocates a large amount of memory. The memory is recovered if the process is interrupted.
Value
returns a character vector with the same length as names and containing unique strings.
See Also
make.names
Examples
make.unique(c("a", "a", "a", "a"))
#  "a"   "a.1" "a.2" "a.3"
make.unique(c("a", "a", "a", "a.1"))
#  "a"   "a.2" "a.3" "a.1"
make.unique(c(make.unique(c("a", "a", "a")), "a"))
#  "a"   "a.1" "a.2" "a.3"

# unique vector A is not changed
A <- c("a","b","c")
B <- c("b","c","d")
make.unique(c(A,B))
#  "a"   "b"   "c"   "b.1" "c.1" "d"
Package base version 6.1.1-7
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