How do keep only unique words within each string in a vector

Split it up (strsplit on spaces), use unique (in lapply), and paste it back together:

vapply(lapply(strsplit(vector, " "), unique), paste, character(1L), collapse = " ")
# [1] "hello i like to code" "coding is fun"        "fun"  

## OR
vapply(strsplit(vector, " "), function(x) paste(unique(x), collapse = " "), character(1L))

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Update based on comments

You can always write a custom function to use with your vapply function. For instance, here's a function that takes a split string, drops strings that are shorter than a certain number of characters, and has the "unique" setting as a user choice.

myFun <- function(x, minLen = 3, onlyUnique = TRUE) {
  a <- if (isTRUE(onlyUnique)) unique(x) else x
  paste(a[nchar(a) > minLen], collapse = " ")
}

Compare the output of the following to see how it would work.

vapply(strsplit(vector, " "), myFun, character(1L))
vapply(strsplit(vector, " "), myFun, character(1L), onlyUnique = FALSE)
vapply(strsplit(vector, " "), myFun, character(1L), minLen = 0)