Make Simple String from Repeating a Character, e.g. Blank String

Simple constructors of a constant character string from one character, notably a “blank” string of given string length.

M.M. is now ‘mentally deprecating’ bl.string in favor of using repChar() in all cases.

With R 3.3.0 (May 2016), the new function strrep() was introduced; it is faster typically, and more flexible, e.g. accepting a vector for the 2nd argument.
This (for now informally) deprecates all uses of repChar() and bl.string().

repChar(char, no)
bl.string(no)

Arguments

char

single character (or arbitrary string).

no

non-negative integer.

Value

One string, i.e., character(1)), for bl.string a blank string, fulfilling n == nchar(bl.string(n)).

Author

Martin Maechler, early 1990's (for bl.string).

See also

paste, character, nchar.

Examples

r <- sapply(0:8, function(n) ccat(repChar(" ",n), n))
cbind(r)
#>       r          
#>  [1,] "0"        
#>  [2,] " 1"       
#>  [3,] "  2"      
#>  [4,] "   3"     
#>  [5,] "    4"    
#>  [6,] "     5"   
#>  [7,] "      6"  
#>  [8,] "       7" 
#>  [9,] "        8"

repChar("-", 4)
#> [1] "----"
repChar("_", 6)
#> [1] "______"
## it may make sense to a string of more than one character:
repChar("-=- ", 6)
#> [1] "-=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- "

## show the very simple function definitions:
repChar
#> function (char, no) 
#> paste(rep.int(char, no), collapse = "")
#> <bytecode: 0x55dd112ae9f0>
#> <environment: namespace:sfsmisc>
bl.string
#> function (no) 
#> sprintf("%*s", no, "")
#> <bytecode: 0x55dd106e19d0>
#> <environment: namespace:sfsmisc>