Automatic acronyms of strings in R

parsing, r, string

Solution

An easy way would be to use a combination of `strsplit`, `substr`, and `make.unique`.

Here's an example function that can be written:

makeInitials <- function(charVec) {
  make.unique(vapply(strsplit(toupper(charVec), " "), 
                     function(x) paste(substr(x, 1, 1), collapse = ""), 
                     vector("character", 1L)))
}

Test it out:

X <- c("Hello World", "Home Work", "holidays with children", "Hello Europe")
makeInitials(X)
# [1] "HW"   "HW.1" "HWC"  "HE"

That said, I do think that `abbreviate` should suffice, if you use some of its arguments:

abbreviate(X, minlength=1)
#            Hello World              Home Work holidays with children           Hello Europe 
#                  "HlW"                  "HmW"                  "hwc"                   "HE"

Problem

Long strings in plots aren't always attractive. What's the shortest way of making an acronym in R? E.g., "Hello world" to "HW", and preferably to have unique acronyms. There's function `abbreviate`, but it just removes some letters from the phrase, instead of taking first letters of each word.

Original source