[R] Misunderstanding escape (backslash)

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 10/16/06, Frank McCown <fmccown at cs.odu.edu> wrote:
> Forgive my ignorance, but shouldn't '\\' be converted into '\' in my
> string?  In my output (below), you can see that '\\' remains '\\'.
>
>  > term = "mother\'s day"
>  > term
> [1] "mother's day"
>  > term = "mother\\\'s day"
>  > term
> [1] "mother\\'s day"      <--- should be "mother\'s day"

I think this is just  a matter of interpetation of the output:

> strsplit("mother\\'s day", NULL)[[1]]
 [1] "m"  "o"  "t"  "h"  "e"  "r"  "\\" "'"  "s"  " "  "d"  "a"  "y"

> cat("mother\\'s day", "\n")
mother\'s day

> nchar("mother\\'s day")
[1] 13