Character Data Type

Part of the Fundamentals section of Coddy's R journey — lesson 6 of 78.

The character data type is R's way of storing text information. In other programming languages, this is often called a "string," but R uses the term "character."

The character data type is used to store any text, whether it's a single word, a sentence, or even just a single letter. To create a character variable, you enclose your text in double quotes <strong>“”</strong> and use the assignment operator you've already learned:

name <- "Alice"
message <- "Welcome to R programming"

The double quotes tell R that everything inside should be treated as text, not as code. This means you can store names, addresses, descriptions, or any other textual information in character variables.

Challenge

Easy

Create a character variable called greeting that stores the message "Hello, John!" Then display the greeting using the print() function.

Try it yourself

# TODO: Write your code here

# Display the greeting
print(greeting)

Test yourself

This lesson includes a short quiz. Start the lesson to answer it and track your progress.

All lessons in Fundamentals

1Introduction to R

What is R?Hello World Comments in R

4Operators Part 2

Logical Operators (AND, OR)Logical Operators Part 2 (NOT)Recap - Simple Logic Vectorized Logic Part 1 Vectorized Logic Part 2

7Bill Split Calculator

Welcome Message Getting User Input

Calculating The Tip And Total

Splitting The Bill

Formatted Output (sprintf)

10FizzBuzz with a Twist

Game Overview The FizzBuzz Function

Looping Through Numbers

Adding The Twist

13Vectors Advanced

Vector Slicing and Indexing Logical Indexing Vector Arithmetic & Recycling The %in% Operator