[R] Lost backslashes in parse()

[Thomas Lumley]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, David Brahm wrote:

> I'm comparing R-1.3.0 on Solaris 2.6 to R-1.3.1 on WindowsNT.  The following
> 5-line script returns TRUE on Unix but FALSE on NT:
>
> fnam <- tempfile()
> file.create(fnam)
> txt <- paste("file.exists(\"", fnam, "\")", sep="")
> expr <- parse(text=txt)
> eval(expr)
>
> The issue seems to be that backslashes get lost in the parsing.  A workaround
> is to change the 3rd line to the rather ugly:
>   txt <- paste("file.exists(\"", gsub("\\\\","\\\\\\\\",fnam), "\")", sep="")
>
> Do you think this is something parse() should handle better?  If not, would it
> be preferable for tempfile() to return a forward-slash filename on NT?  How
> else could you make this script return TRUE on NT?  Thanks!
>

I don't understand why you are doing the paste and parse step, so I may
not be able to help properly, but it seems to be that


 fnam <- tempfile()
 file.create(fnam)
 file.exists(fnam)

would work. There are also functions to manipulate paths described in
help(file.path) and help(basename)

	-thomas

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