title: R: How to re-concatenate a split string in a data frame
body: <p>I created a data frame using the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Student &lt;- c("John Davis","Angela Williams","Bullwinkle Moose","David Jones",
  "Janice Markhammer","Cheryl Cushing","Reuven Ytzrhak","Greg Knox","Joel England",
  "Mary Rayburn")
  Math &lt;- c(502,600,412,358,495,512,410,625,573,522)
  Science &lt;- c(95,99,80,82,75,85,80,95,89,86)
  English &lt;- c(25,22,18,15,20,28,15,30,27,18)
  student.exam.data &lt;- data.frame(Student,Math,Science,English)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I then split "John Davis" via <code>student.exam.data$Student[1] &lt;- strsplit(as.character(student.exam.data$Student[1]), " ", fixed = FALSE)</code> into <code>c("John", "Davis")</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I'm now attempting to re-concatenate the two characters into a single "John Davis" string. I've tried <code>paste(student.exam.data$Student[1], collapse = " ")</code>, <code>paste(as.vector(student.exam.data$Student[1]), collapse = " ")</code>, and <code>toString(student.exam.data$Student[1])</code>. All three return <code>"c(\"John\", \"Davis\")"</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Firstly, why do these return the backslashes, and secondly, what would be the appropriate way to approach this?</p>