paste documentation

[shannonpileggi]

No description provided.

[shannonpileggi]

There is healthy discussion of paste documentation in bugzilla. In part because of some the discussion mixes effects of same length vs different length vectors (i.e., in the presence of recycling vs not). In addition, the sole zero-length input has special behavior.

Here are the cases I explored:

# no recycling; single input
paste({}, recycle0 = TRUE, collapse = NULL, sep = "|")
paste({}, recycle0 = TRUE, collapse = "&", sep = "|")
paste({}, recycle0 = FALSE, collapse = NULL, sep = "|")
paste({}, recycle0 = FALSE, collapse = "&", sep = "|")

# no recycling; two inputs
paste({}, 1, recycle0 = TRUE, collapse = NULL, sep = "|")
paste({}, 1, recycle0 = TRUE, collapse = "&", sep = "|")
paste({}, 1, recycle0 = FALSE, collapse = NULL, sep = "|")
paste({}, 1, recycle0 = FALSE, collapse = "&", sep = "|")

# recycling; two inputs
paste({}, 1:2, recycle0 = TRUE, collapse = NULL, sep = "|")
paste({}, 1:2, recycle0 = TRUE, collapse = "&", sep = "|")
paste({}, 1:2, recycle0 = FALSE, collapse = NULL, sep = "|")
paste({}, 1:2, recycle0 = FALSE, collapse = "&", sep = "|")

with results summarized as follows:

In order to clarify documentation, I propose

1. Modifying the "Details" section
2. Modifying the arguments description of recycle0
3. Modifying the examples section

[trangdata]

Looks good to me! 💯 I only have a minor comment.

[trangdata]

A minor suggestion on spacing

Suggested change

	\code{""} .}
	\code{""}.}

[shannonpileggi]

excellent catch, thank you so much @trangdata!

[MichaelChirico]

Personally I would prefer paste(character(), 1:2). {} is concise, but masks two behaviors:

1. the empty expression evaluates to NULL: identical(NULL, {}) is TRUE
2. inputs to paste() are cast with as.character(): identical(as.character(NULL), character()) is TRUE

Using character() is thus more "minimal" in the sense of demonstrating the behavior more directly

[shannonpileggi]

Thank you for pointing this out, @MichaelChirico!