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.

Cheat sheet

The character data type stores text information in R. To create a character variable, enclose text in double quotes "":

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

Use print() to display character variables:

print(name)

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