Unique combination of all elements from two (or more) vectors

Question

I am trying to create a unique combination of all elements from two vectors of different size in R.

For example, the first vector is

a <- c(\"ABC\         


        

Answer 1

The tidyr package provides the nice alternative crossing, which works better than the classic expand.grid function because (1) strings are not converted into factors and (2) the sorting is more intuitive:

library(tidyr)

a <- c("ABC", "DEF", "GHI")
b <- c("2012-05-01", "2012-05-02", "2012-05-03", "2012-05-04", "2012-05-05")

crossing(a, b)

# A tibble: 15 x 2
       a          b
         
 1   ABC 2012-05-01
 2   ABC 2012-05-02
 3   ABC 2012-05-03
 4   ABC 2012-05-04
 5   ABC 2012-05-05
 6   DEF 2012-05-01
 7   DEF 2012-05-02
 8   DEF 2012-05-03
 9   DEF 2012-05-04
10   DEF 2012-05-05
11   GHI 2012-05-01
12   GHI 2012-05-02
13   GHI 2012-05-03
14   GHI 2012-05-04
15   GHI 2012-05-05