[R] String comparison, trailing blanks make a difference.

[William Dunlap]

>>"abc" == "abc "
> [1] FALSE

R does no interpretation of strings when doing comparisons so you do
have do your own canonicalization.  That may involve removing
trailing, leading, or all white space or punctuation, converting to
lower or upper case, mapping nicknames to official names, trimming to
a fixed number of characters, etc.

Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com


On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 9:17 AM, John McKown
<john.archie.mckown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, this was a shock to me. And I don't really see any documentation
> about it, but perhaps I just can't see it.
>
>>"abc" == "abc "
> [1] FALSE
>
> I guess that I thought of strings in R like I do is some other
> languages where the shorter value is padded with blanks to the length
> of the longer value, then compared. I.e. that trailing blanks didn't
> matter.
>
> The best solution that I have found is to use the str_trim() function
> from the stringr to remove all the trailing blanks after I get the
> data from the SQL data base. I cannot change the SQL schema to make
> the column a varchar instead of a char column. It is a vendor DB. And
> I don't know an ANSI SQL standard way to remove trailing blanks in the
> SELECT command. PostgreSQL has a "trim(trailing ' ' from column)', but
> MS-SQL upchucks on that syntax.
>
> --
> There is nothing more pleasant than traveling and meeting new people!
> Genghis Khan
>
> Maranatha! <><
> John McKown
>
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