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gsub and "\"

4 messages · jim holtman, Sean Davis, (Ted Harding)

#
This is hopefully a simple question.  I am trying to escape single
quotes like so:

abc's   >> abc\'s

However, I cannot find an easy way to do that with gsub:

gsub("'","\\\\'","abc's")
# returns "abc\\'s"

How can I get a single \ in the output?

Thanks,
Sean
#
It does have a single \; the printing just shows that it is escaped.
If you 'cat' it to output, you will see:
[1] "abc\\'s"
abc\'s

Which I think is what you were thinking it would be.  So when you
write it out to a file, it will be correct.
On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Sean Davis <sdavis2 at mail.nih.gov> wrote:

  
    
#
On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 11:57 AM, jim holtman <jholtman at gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks, Jim.  That does it.

Sean
#
On 09-Jul-08 15:49:54, Sean Davis wrote:
In terms of the internal representation, I think you have in fact
got what you want. It's just that when it's prented on the screen,
the internal "\" is printed as "\\":

  nchar("abc\\'s")
  # [1] 6

  nchar("abc's")
  # [1] 5

Quite how you get it to be displayed as "abc\'s" is another matter,
and I don't have an answer to it!

Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
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Date: 09-Jul-08                                       Time: 17:06:40
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