Difference Between print() and cat()

Difference between print() and cat()

Both print() and cat() can be used to display text on the screen. Let’s have a look at the code:

The simple printing method in R is to use print(). As its name indicates, this method prints its arguments on the R console. However, cat() does the same thing but is valid only for atomic types (logical, integer, real, complex, character) and names, which will be covered in the later chapters. This means that we cannot call cat() on a non-empty list or any type of object. So, as its name implies, it converts arguments to characters and concatenates them.

An essential difference between cat() and print() is the class of the object they return. For now, you can assume that class means the type of object. This difference between the two methods can have practical consequences because there will be certain constraints as to what you can do with the returned object.

print() displays its arguments to the console (or other output device) and invisibly returns its input. cat() concatenates and prints its arguments but does not return a value that can be assigned to any variable.

As you can see, cat() prints its arguments without quotes. In essence, cat() displays its content on the screen or in a file.

Concatenating Strings Using cat()

The actual usefulness of cat() can be obtained when we have two or more strings that we want to concatenate.

Concatenating Strings Using print()

Since we say that print() and cat() have almost the same functionality, we can also concatenate multiple strings using print() with the help of paste().