escaping backslash in a string
Dan Lipsitt <danlipsitt at gmail.com> writes:
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] "\\"
Nononononono.... If you want to know what is inside a string, use cat() not (implicitly) print()
cat( "\\.")
\.> The thing is that print() itself escapes "weird" characters, including the escape character:
x <- readLines() # ctr-D terminates (on Linux anyway)
\.
x
[1] "\\."
Is there a way to represent "\"? This seems like a design problem in the interpreter.
Yes. Not at all.
O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Blegdamsvej 3 c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics 2200 Cph. N (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk) FAX: (+45) 35327907