[R] Help with sub functions

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 29 Sep 2009, edchen51 at gmail.com wrote:

>
> I have chances to work with both linux based and win based R codes. 
> And as you all know in linux, the file directories use "/" and win 
> uses "\\". Is there a function like sub or gsub that could 
> substitute those slashes automatically?

See ?chartr, and you can also use gsub(fixed = TRUE).

But as both the R and rw FAQs tell you, your assertion about 'win' is 
incorrect for modern Windows: the Windows system functions accept 
either slash or backslash, as do all but a few badly-written Windows 
applications.

A word of warning: the ASCII representation of \ is both a character 
in Windows DBCS encodings (used for CJK languages, it is rendered as 
the Yen symbol in most DBCS fonts) and a trail byte, and you need to 
be very careful with substitutions.  We have had reports of both gsub 
and chartr mangling Chinese file names, although it is likely they 
were not in a Chinese locale and it was before many Unicode-related 
changes in R under Windows.

> Thanks!
>
> Edward Chen
> Email: tkedch at msn.com
> Cell Phone: 510-371-4717

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595