What's New in R 4.6.0? The Best Additions to the Language

🔵 R 4.6.0 (“Because it was There”) — highlights

R 4.6.0 was released on April 24th 2026. As always, the R team delivers improvements that make code clearer and data exploration tools more powerful.

✨ The 3 most interesting new features:

1. %notin% — now in base R Before: ! ("a" %in% LETTERS) — works but reads awkwardly Now: "a" %notin% LETTERS — direct and readable It was so common across packages that it was finally elevated to base R.

2. DOI in citation() When citing R in publications, the output now includes a DOI (doi:10.32614/R.manuals), making references in academic journals and papers easier.

3. Improved summary() for character vectors Previously it only showed Length, Class, Mode for text columns. Now it also shows: number of unique values (N.unique), blanks (N.blank) and minimum string length (Min.nchar) — much more useful when exploring data.

💡 Explanation in a nutshell

#

R 4.6.0 adds %notin% to the base language, adds a DOI to the R project citation, and improves summary() output for character columns, making data exploration more direct and informative.

More information at the link 👇

What’s new in R 4.6.0? | R-bloggers

R 4.6.0 (“Because it was There”) is set for release on April 24th 2026. Here we summarise some of the more interesting changes that have …

www.r-bloggers.com ↗