Make Canonical Name

Often there is a need to construct a name from several different components. While a common method to construct these names from the provided components in the provided order, it can lead to different names for the same thing.

If the name for an object is composed from two or more columns there is the possibility that the components change order within the columns. In some cases the name "yaddy-blah" is the same as "blah-yaddy." This function takes the provided components, replaces NAs with "Unk", orders the components alphabetically and in numerical order, and then combines the components with "-"s.

Usage

canonical.name(name.vector)

Arguments

name.vector

A string containing the components to comprise the canonical name.

Value

string with the canonical name

Author

Emilio Xavier Esposito emilio.esposito@gmail.com (https://github.com/emilioxavier)

Examples

canonical.name(c("yaddy", "yaddy", "blah", "ugh"))
#> [1] "blah-ugh-yaddy-yaddy"

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
  ## the following is how to implement the `canonical.name()` via `dplyr::mutate()`
  mutate(name=canonical.name(c(column.1, column.2)))

} # }