[R] How to print a variable with in double quotes

Duncan Murdoch murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Fri Sep 4 20:40:30 CEST 2009


On 9/4/2009 12:18 PM, sailu Yellaboina wrote:
> I want to print a variable with in double quotes.
>  For example
> 
> x = 10 ;
> x  ;    #prints 10
> "x" ;  #prints x
> \"x\" ; # Error: unexpected input in "\"
> 
> I want to the out put as    '10'  or "10"

There are lots of ways to do that.  The simplest is to convert x to a 
character value, and it will automatically print that way:

 > x <- 10
 > as.character(x)
[1] "10"

A more general way is to use cat(), then you can print whatever you want:

 > cat("'", x, "'\n", sep="")
'10'

The obvious disadvantage is that you need to worry about adding a new 
line at the end (the \n), and the separator between each thing you're 
printing (sep="" says put nothing there, the default is a space).

Duncan Murdoch




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