abbreviate(names.arg, minlength=4, use.classes=TRUE,
dot=FALSE)
names.arg
| a vector of names to be abbreviated. |
minlength
| the minimum length of the abbreviations. |
use.classes
| a flag which is ignored by R. |
dot
| a flag indicating whether to postpend a dot. |
names.arg will be given identical
abbreviations. If any non-duplicated elements have the same
minlength abbreviations then minlength is incremented
by one and new abbreviations are found for those elements only.
This process is repeated until all unique elements of names.arg
have unique abbreviations.
The character version of names.arg is attached to the returned value
as a names argument.
The algorithm used is similar to that of S.
First spaces at the beginning of the word are stripped.
Then any other spaces are stripped.
Next lower case vowels are removed followed by lower case consonants.
Finally if the abbreviation is still longer than minlength
upper case letters are stripped.
Letters are always stripped from the end of the word first.
If an element of names.arg contains more than one word
(words are separted by space) then at least one letter from
each word will be retained.
If a single string is passed it is abbreviated in the same manner as a
vector of strings.
If use.classes is FALSE then the only distinction is to be between
letters and space. This has NOT been implemented.
substr.