Making a string concatenation operator in R

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As others have mentioned, you cannot override the sealed S4 method “+”. However, you do not need to define a new class in order to define an addition function for strings; this is not ideal since it forces you to convert the class of strings and thus leading to more ugly code. Instead, one can simply overwrite the “+” function:

"+" = function(x,y) {
    if(is.character(x) || is.character(y)) {
        return(paste(x , y, sep=""))
    } else {
        .Primitive("+")(x,y)
    }
}

Then the following should all work as expected:

1 + 4
1:10 + 4 
"Help" + "Me"

This solution feels a bit like a hack, since you are no longer using formal methods but its the only way to get the exact behavior you wanted.

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