% Generated by roxygen2: do not edit by hand
% Please edit documentation in R/sym.R
\name{as_string}
\alias{as_string}
\title{Cast symbol to string}
\usage{
as_string(x)
}
\arguments{
\item{x}{A string or symbol. If a string, the attributes are
removed, if any.}
}
\value{
A character vector of length 1.
}
\description{
\code{as_string()} converts \link[=sym]{symbols} to character strings.
}
\section{Unicode tags}{


Unlike \code{\link[base:name]{base::as.symbol()}} and \code{\link[base:name]{base::as.name()}}, \code{as_string()}
automatically transforms unicode tags such as \code{"<U+5E78>"} to the
proper UTF-8 character. This is important on Windows because:
\itemize{
\item R on Windows has no UTF-8 support, and uses native encoding instead.
\item The native encodings do not cover all Unicode characters. For
example, Western encodings do not support CKJ characters.
\item When a lossy UTF-8 -> native transformation occurs, uncovered
characters are transformed to an ASCII unicode tag like \code{"<U+5E78>"}.
\item Symbols are always encoded in native. This means that
transforming the column names of a data frame to symbols might be
a lossy operation.
\item This operation is very common in the tidyverse because of data
masking APIs like dplyr where data frames are transformed to
environments. While the names of a data frame are stored as a
character vector, the bindings of environments are stored as
symbols.
}

Because it reencodes the ASCII unicode tags to their UTF-8
representation, the string -> symbol -> string roundtrip is
more stable with \code{as_string()}.
}

\examples{
# Let's create some symbols:
foo <- quote(foo)
bar <- sym("bar")

# as_string() converts symbols to strings:
foo
as_string(foo)

typeof(bar)
typeof(as_string(bar))
}
\seealso{
\code{\link[=as_name]{as_name()}} for a higher-level variant of \code{as_string()}
that automatically unwraps quosures.
}