How to convert backslash to slash?

Shengqiao Li wrote:

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

On 23/09/2008 4:00 PM, Shengqiao Li wrote:

How to use sub, gsub, etc. to replace "\" in a string to "/"?

For example,convert "C:\foo\bar" to "C:/foo/bar".

If those are R strings, there are no backslashes in the first one.  It has 
a formfeed and a backspace in it.

I did notice that this string  was special. It's a legimate R string. If 
"f" and "b" are replaced by "d", it will not. 

I didn't say it was not legitimate, I said that it contains no backslashes. 
If you replace f or b with d, you do not have a legitimate string.

My purpose is to convert a Windows file path (eg. copied from Explorer 
location bar) to a R file path through some R function inside R terminal. 
The "File->Change dir..." takes a file path like "C:\Acer", but setwd 
function will fail. 

That's not true.  If you enter a backslash in the string, setwd() works fine.

Your problem is that you are confusing R source code with the strings that it 
represents.  The R source code for the file path C:\Acer is "C:\\Acer".  The
R source code "C:\foo\bar" contains no backslashes, it contains the 
characters C, :, formfeed, o, o,  backspace, a, r.

If you have the string C:\Acer in the Windows clipboard, then you can read it 
from there using readClipboard().  (There are many other ways to read the 
clipboard as well;
using 'clipboard' as a filename generally works.) You can then pass it to 
setwd(), and it will be fine.

Duncan Murdoch

I guess there must be some ways in R to replace a backslash by slash, eg. 
C:\Acer -> C:/Acer. The first problem may be how to pass and save this kind 
of strings. encodeString does not work for this, it will just ignore "\".
  Shengqiao Li

Duncan Murdoch