[R] gsub() with unicode and escape character

[Prof Brian Ripley]

You forgot the 'at a minimum' information required by the posting 
guide.

Most likely this is a limitation of the locale you used (and failed to 
tell us about) on the OS you used (...).

On Sat, 16 Jul 2011, Sverre Stausland wrote:

> Dear helpers,
>
> I'm trying to replace a character with a unicode code inside a data
> frame using gsub(), but unsuccessfully.
>
>> data.frame(animals=c("dog","wolf","cat"))->my.data
>> gsub("o","\u0254",my.data$animals)->my.data$animals
>> my.data$animals
> [1] "dɔg"  "wɔlf" "cat"
>
> It's not that a data frame cannot have unicode codes, cf. e.g.
>
>> data.frame(animals=c("d\u0254g","w\u0254lf","cat"))->my.data.2
>> my.data.2$animals
> [1] dɔg  wɔlf cat
> Levels: cat d<U+0254>g w<U+0254>lf
>
> I've done the best I can based on what ?gsub and ?enc2utf8 tell me,
> but I haven't found a solution.
>
> Unrelated to that problem, but related to gsub() is that I can't find
> a way for gsub() to interpret the backslash as a character. In regular
> expression, \\ should represent "the character \", but gsub() doesn't:
>
>> data.frame(animals=c("dog","wolf","cat"))->my.data
>> gsub("d","\\",my.data$animals)
> [1] "og"   "wolf" "cat"
>
> Thank you
> Sverre
>
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>

-- 
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