Four ways to reverse a string in R
R offers several ways to reverse a string, include some base R options. We go through a few of those in this post. We'll also compare the computational time for each method. Reversing a string can be especially useful in bioinformatics (e.g. finding the reverse compliment of a DNA strand). To get started, let's generate a random string of 10 million DNA bases (we can do this with the stringi package as well, but for our purposes here, let's just use base R functions). 1) Base R with strsplit and paste One way to reverse a string is to use strsplit with paste. This is the slowest method that will be shown, but it does get the job done without needing any packages. In this example, we use strsplit to…