[R] Removing backslashes from data

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 4/3/2009 2:33 PM, Andrew Conway wrote:
> I am trying to check for backslashes in data, then remove them when I  
> find them, but am having a difficult time figuring out the best way to  
> do it.  I know the backslash is the escape character in R, and I  
> should be able to use 'gsub' to accomplish this, but I all I seem to  
> be getting are errors.  For example:
> 
> If entry is:
> "Hello\World"
> 
> I want:
> "HelloWorld"
> 
> There are several entries with backslashes, and I need to find them  
> and delete them.  All help is welcome, thank you.

This gets a little confusing because print() automatically doubles 
backslashes.  To see what's really going on, you need to use cat.  Then 
the following can be seen to work:

input <- "\"Hello\\World\""
cat(input, "\n")
output <- gsub("\\\\", "", input)
cat(output, "\n")

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> ___________________________________
> Drew Conway
> Ph.D. Student
> Department of Politics, New York University
> agc282 at nyu.edu
> http://homepages.nyu.edu/~agc282
> 
> 
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