Rcpp function for subsetting strings - c++

Question

I was wondering if there was an Rcpp function which takes an Rcpp::String data type as input and returns a given character (by index) of the string. For example, extracting the character at index 0 of the string. This would be equivalent to the string::at method from the string header in c++. I have written this:
#include <vector>
#include <string>
#include <Rcpp.h>
using namespace Rcpp;
typedef std::vector<std::string> stringList;
int SplitGenotypesA(std::string s) {
char a = s.at(0);
int b = a - '0';
return b;
}
But would prefer not to have to convert between Rcpp::String and std::string types.

Answer 1

You can feed an R vector of strings directly to C++ using Rcpp::StringVector. This will obviously handle single elements too.
Getting the nth character of the ith element of your vector is as simple as vector[i][n].
So, without using std::string you can do this:
#include<Rcpp.h>
// [[Rcpp::export]]
Rcpp::NumericVector SplitGenotypesA(Rcpp::StringVector R_character_vector)
{
int number_of_strings = R_character_vector.size();
Rcpp::NumericVector result(number_of_strings);
for(int i = 0; i < number_of_strings; ++i)
{
char a = R_character_vector[i][0];
result[i] = a - '0';
}
return result;
}
Now in R you can do:
SplitGenotypesA("9C")
# [1] 9
or better yet,
SplitGenotypesA(c("1A", "2B", "9C"))
# [1] 1 2 9
Which is even a little faster than the native R method of doing the same thing:
microbenchmark::microbenchmark(
R_method = as.numeric(substr(c("1A", "2B", "9C"), 1, 1)),
Rcpp_method = SplitGenotypesA(c("1A", "2B", "9C")),
times = 1000)
# Unit: microseconds
# expr min lq mean median uq max neval
# R_method 3.422 3.765 4.076722 4.107 4.108 46.881 1000
# Rcpp_method 3.080 3.423 3.718779 3.765 3.765 32.509 1000