Difference between paste and print (affecting result of function)

Question

To start off, I\'m not really sure what the difference between paste and print is. But I am using \"print\" to spit out generic statements and \"paste\" to spit out statemen

Answer 1

paste concatenates (pastes) strings and returns a character vector, so you can do thing like

paste('a','b', sep = '-')

## [1] "a-b"

print prints values. From ?print

print prints its argument and returns it invisibly (via invisible(x)). It is a generic function which means that new printing methods can be easily added for new classes.

Most classes will have a defined print method (or will use print.default)

You can see the available print methods by typing

methods('print')

In your case paste("TS= ", TS, sep=" ") returns a character vector, so when this is the result of the function, print.character is used to display the results

In fact, I think you want message not print or print.noquote.

T <- function() {
    if (exists("TS"))
    {
        message(paste("TS= ", TS, sep=" "))
    } else if (!exists("TS")) {
        message("No TS Values")
    }
    message("my exsistance removes paste output") 
}