How can I get a single backslash in a character string?
My goal is to escape dots in a string that will be used as a regular
expression. I thought I could do it this way:
gsub(".", "\\.", x)
Unfortunately, "\\" does not represent a literal backslash as I
expected, but rather a pair of backslashes:
"\\."
[1] "\\."
"\\"
[1] "\\"
Just a backslash and a dot fails too, since that represents an escaped dot:
"\."
[1] "."
A single backslash works in the middle of strings sometimes,but it
depends on what the character following it is (presumably depending on
whether the pair of characters represents an escape sequence):
"a\b"
[1] "a\b"
"x\y"
[1] "xy"
Is there a way to represent "\"? This seems like a design problem in
the interpreter.
R.version
_
platform i386-redhat-linux-gnu
arch i386
os linux-gnu
system i386, linux-gnu
status
major 2
minor 0.1
year 2004
month 11
day 15
language R