[R] Escaping regular expressions

[Gabor Grothendieck]

This is not minimal (it will escape every non-word character) but is
short and the needlessly escaped ones should do no harm (though you
might want to double check that assumption on a few examples):

gsub("(\\W)", "\\\\\\1", x)

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Hadley Wickham <hadley at rice.edu> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Is there a method for escaping strings to be used regular expressions?
>  i.e. if I have a user supplied string that I'd like to use as a fixed
> component is there a method that will turn (e.g.) ".$^" into
> "\\.\\$\\^" ?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Hadley
>
> --
> http://had.co.nz/
>
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