[Rd] Replace back slashes with forward slashes?

[Spencer Graves]

Hi, Simon:

On 2/29/2012 10:04 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> On Feb 29, 2012, at 12:37 PM, Spencer Graves wrote:
>
>> Hello, All:
>>
>>
>>       What can people tell me about converting back slashes to forward slashes in character strings?
>>
>>
> That's it's trivially done with
>
> gsub("\\", "/", x, fixed=TRUE)
>
> Where x is the character string (and I suppose you are aware of it since you are using it below).

       It does not work for me.  Consider the following:


 > x <- 'c:\Users\'
Error: '\U' used without hex digits in character string starting "c:\U"


       This is one reason I needed to use "scan".  Even if I could get 
past this, consider the following:


 > x <- '\t'
 > gsub('\\', '/', x, fixed=TRUE)
[1] "\t"


       It seems far from trivial, which is why I wrote this function and 
am looking for a better one.


       Thanks for the reply.


       Spencer
>
> The rest of this e-mail makes absolutely no sense to me -- what exactly are you taking about? What else do you want to achieve?
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
>
>
>
>
>
>>       Several years ago, Prof. Ripley provided a solution, which I lost and have not been able to find.
>>
>>
>>       Below please find a function to do this.  I do not find this very satisfactory, however, because it uses "scan" and therefore operates on an input not a character string.  Unless someone suggests something better, I plan to add this to the "sos" package and issue a new release very soon.  (The new release is needed, because the RSiteSearch capability has been modified in a way that breaks the current "findFn" core of "sos".)
>>
>>
>>       Thanks,
>>       Spencer
>>
>> back2forwardslash<- function (nmax = 1, pattern = "\\", replacement = "/") {
>>     x<- scan(what = character(), quote = pattern, nmax = nmax)
>>     x.<- gsub(pattern, replacement, x, fixed = TRUE)
>>     paste(x., collapse = " ")
>> }
>>
>> (x<- back2forwardslash())
>> c:\Users\
>>
>> # nmax must be one more than the number of embedded blanks
>> (x3<- back2forwardslash(3))
>> c:\u\a b\c d
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
>> President and Chief Technology Officer
>> Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
>> 751 Emerson Ct.
>> San José, CA 95126
>> ph:  408-655-4567
>> web:  www.structuremonitoring.com
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>


-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Technology Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph:  408-655-4567
web:  www.structuremonitoring.com