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). [code lang="R"] set.seed(1) dna <- paste(sample(c("A", "T", "C", "G"), 10000000, replace = T), collapse = "") [/code] 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…