nchar() method in R Programming Language is used to get the length of a character in a string object.

Syntax: nchar(string)

Where: String is object.

Return: Returns the length of a string. 

R – length of string using nchar() Example

In this example, we are going to see how to get the length of a string object using nchar() method.

# R program to calculate length of string

# Given String
gfg < - "Geeks For Geeks"

# Using nchar() method
answer < - nchar(gfg)

print(answer)

Output:

[1] 15

Example 2: Use nchar for R Vector

In this example, we will get the length of the vector using nchar() method.

# R program to get length of Character Vectors

# by default numeric values
# are converted into characters
v1 <- c('geeks', '2', 'hello', 57)

# Displaying type of vector
typeof(v1)

nchar(v1)

Output:

'character'
5 1 5 2

Example 3: Passing NA values to the nchar() function

The nchar() function provides an optional argument called keepNA, it can help when dealing with NA values.

# R program to create Character Vectors

# by default numeric values
# are converted into characters
v1 <- c(NULL, '2', 'hello', NA)

nchar(v1, keepNA = FALSE)

Output:

1 5 2

In the above example, the first element is NULL then it returns nothing and the last element NA returns 2 because we keep keepNA = FALSE. If we pass keepNA = TRUE, then see the following output:

# R program to create Character Vectors

# by default numeric values
# are converted into characters
v1 <- c('', NULL, 'hello', NA)

nchar(v1, keepNA = TRUE)

Output:

0 5