How to convert backslash to slash?

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

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How to convert backslash to slash?

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