How to convert backslash to slash?

It probably depends on how you are prompting the user for input.  Here
is what happens with 'readline' and you will see that the string after
input does have the backslashes escaped.

x <- readline("Input File: ")

Input File: c:\dir1\dir2\file.name

x

[1] "c:\\dir1\\dir2\\file.name"

gsub("\\\\", "/", x)  # notice the double escape

[1] "c:/dir1/dir2/file.name"

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 8:53 AM, Shengqiao Li <shli at stat.wvu.edu> wrote:

On Wed, 24 Sep 2008, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

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.

Thank you for your reply. readClipboard is a partial solution to this case.
More generally, if I want to wrtie a R program in which users are asked to
input a file path. I want this program to be robust and tolerant, that is
users can type in C:\Acer or C:/Acer.  What's the way to do this?

Shengqiao Li

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

-- 
Jim Holtman
Cincinnati, OH
+1 513 646 9390

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?