[R] Misunderstanding escape (backslash)

[Peter Dalgaard]

"Gabor Grothendieck" <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> writes:

> 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

And check out the new FAQ 7.37....

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Why-does-backslash-behave-strangely-inside-strings_003f

-- 
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