How to escape backslashes in R string
[...] If I want to get a string containing 5
\
,should i write 10\
[...]
Yes, you should. To write a single \
in a string, you write it as "\\"
.
This is because the \
is a special character, reserved to escape the character that follows it. (Perhaps you recognize \n
as newline.) It's also useful if you want to write a string containing a single "
. You write it as "\""
.
The reason why \\\str
is invalid, is because it's interpreted as \\
(which corresponds to a single \
) followed by \s
, which is not valid, since "escaped s
" has no meaning.
How to escape a backslash in R?
I found a solution that works
str = gsub("([\\])","", str)
substitute single backslash in R
When you need to use a backslash in the string in R, you need to put double backslash. Also, when you use gsub("\\", "/", str)
, the first argument is parsed as a regex, and it is not valid as it only contains a single literal backslash that must escape something. In fact, you need to make gsub
treat it as a plain text with fixed=TRUE
.
However, you might want to use normalizePath
, see this SO thread.
Escaping backslash (\) in string or paths in R
From R 4.0.0 you can use r"(...)"
to write a path as raw string constant, which avoids the need for escaping:
r"(E:\RStuff\test.r)"
# [1] "E:\\RStuff\\test.r"
There is a new syntax for specifying raw character constants similar to the one used in C++:
r"(...)"
with...
any character sequence not containing the sequence)"
. This makes it easier to write strings that contain backslashes or both single and double quotes. For more details see?Quotes
.
Replace slash with a single backslash in R
The solution is to escape the escape character which means 4 '\' in the end.
cat(gsub('/', '\\\\', "file_path/file_name.txt"))
Look at the difference between your standard output with like 'print()' which escapes the escape character, or get the plain string by using 'cat()'.
str_replace_all(string = x, pattern = "/", replacement = "\\\\")
cat(str_replace_all(string = x, pattern = "/", replacement = "\\\\"))
Replace single backslash in R
Since there isn't any direct ways to dealing with single backslashes, here's the closest solution to the problem as provided by David Arenburg in the comments section
gsub("[^A-Za-z0-9]", "", str) #remove all besides the alphabets & numbers
How to automatically handle strings/paths with backslashes?
You can use this hack. Suppose you had copied your path as mentioned then you could use
scan("clipboard", "character", quiet = TRUE)
scan
reads the text copied from the clipboard and takes care about the backslashes. Then copy again what is returned from scan
Ignore escape characters (backslashes) in R strings
You can try to use the 'allowEscapes' argument in scan()
X=scan(what="character",allowEscapes=F)
C:\Users\mhermans\somefile.csv
print(X)
[1] "C:\\Users\\mhermans\\somefile.csv"
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