Combining lines in character vector in R - regex

Question

I have a character vector (content) of about 50,000 lines in R. However, some of the lines when read in from a text file are on separate lines and should not be. Specifically, the lines look something like this:
[1] hello,
[2] world
[3] ""
[4] how
[5] are
[6] you
[7] ""
I would like to combine the lines so that I have something that looks like this:
[1] hello, world
[2] how are you
I have tried to write a for loop:
for(i in 1:length(content)){
if(content[i+1] != ""){
content[i+1] <- c(content[i], content[i+1])
}
}
But when I run the loop, I get an error: missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed.
Can anyone suggest a better way to do this, maybe not even using a loop?
Thanks!
EDIT:
I am actually trying to apply this to a Corpus of documents that are all many thousands lines each. Any ideas on how to translate these solutions into a function that can be applied to the content of each of the documents?

Answer 1

you don't need a loop to do that
x <- c("hello,", "world", "", "how", "\nare", "you", "")
dummy <- paste(
c("\n", sample(letters, 20, replace = TRUE), "\n"),
collapse = ""
) # complex random string as a split marker
x[x == ""] <- dummy #replace empty string by split marker
y <- paste(x, collapse = " ") #make one long string
z <- unlist(strsplit(y, dummy)) #cut the string at the split marker
gsub(" $", "", gsub("^ ", "", z)) # remove space at start and end

Answer 2

I think there are more elegant solutions, but this might be usable for you:
chars <- c("hello,","world","","how","are","you","")
###identify groups that belong together (id increases each time a "" is found)
ids <- cumsum(chars=="")
#split vector (an filter out "" by using the select vector)
select <- chars!=""
splitted <- split(chars[select], ids[select])
#paste the groups together
res <- sapply(splitted,paste, collapse=" ")
#remove names(if necessary, probably not)
res <- unname(res) #thanks #Roland
> res
[1] "hello, world" "how are you"

Answer 3

Here's a different approach using data.table which is likely to be faster than for or *apply loops:
library(data.table)
dt <- data.table(x)
dt[, .(paste(x, collapse = " ")), rleid(x == "")][V1 != ""]$V1
#[1] "hello, world" "how are you"
Sample data:
x <- c("hello,", "world", "", "how", "are", "you", "")

Answer 4

Replace the "" with something you can later split on, and then collapse the characters together, and then use strsplit(). Here I have used the newline character since if you were to just paste it you could get the different lines on the output, e.g. cat(txt3) will output each phrase on a separate line.
txt <- c("hello", "world", "", "how", "are", "you", "", "more", "text", "")
txt2 <- gsub("^$", "\n", txt)
txt3 <- paste(txt2, collapse = " ")
unlist(strsplit(txt3, "\\s\n\\s*"))
## [1] "hello world" "how are you" "more text"

Answer 5

Another way to add to the mix:
tapply(x[x != ''], cumsum(x == '')[x != '']+1, paste, collapse=' ')
# 1 2 3
#"hello, world" "how are you" "more text"
Group by non-empty strings. And paste the elements together by group.