[R] regular expression

[Uwe Ligges]

Laurent Rhelp wrote:
> Dear R-List,
> 
>      I have a great many files in a directory and I would like to 
> replace in every file the character " by the character ' and in the same 
> time, I have to change ' by '' (i.e. the character ' twice and not the 
> unique character ") when the character ' is embodied in "....."
>   So, "....." becomes '.....' and ".....'......" becomes '.....''......'
> Certainly, regular expression could help me but I am not able to use it.
> 
> How can I do that with R ?


In fact, you do not need to know anything about regular expressions in 
this case, since you are simply going to replace certain characters by 
others without any fuzzy restrictions:

x <- "\".....'......\""
cat(x, "\n")
xn <- gsub('"', "'", gsub("'", "''", x))
cat(xn, "\n")


Uwe Ligges


> Thank you very much
> 
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