[R] Why is format(10000, big.mark = "\\,") not 10\,000?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 30/12/2010 1:53 PM, Marius Hofert wrote:
> Dear Uwe,
>
>> Actually I expected
>>
>> format(10000, big.mark = "\\\\,")
>>
>> to work (you need to double excape the backslashes here).
>
> this I also tried :-)
>
>>
>> But the two characters are reversed due to the code in prettyNum(). Not sure if it is expected, but the user was probably not expected to use more than a single character as the big.mark.
>>
>> You can get it right by reversing as in:
>>
>> format(10000, big.mark = ",\\\\")
>
> but then I get "10\\,000" instead of "10\,000". The reason why I want to have "10\,000" is for use in LaTeX. If I produce the format "10\\,000" in a table, then xtable gives me 10$\backslash$,000 for the corresponding cell entry, which is wrong :-(. Do you know a trick for that?

I think you are confusing strings with the way they are printed.  "\\" 
is how a single backslash is printed (by print()), which escapes the \. 
  Use cat() to output it without adding the escape.

Duncan Murdoch

>
> Cheers,
>
> Marius
>
>>
>>
>> Uwe Ligges
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 30.12.2010 19:32, Marius Hofert wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> why does format(10000, big.mark = "\\,") not give me "10\,000"? How can I get this kind of "big.mark"?
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Marius
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>
> ______________________________________________
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> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.