[R] file path

[Wincent]

Thanks for the suggestion. The file name in my case is Chinese, which
makes the regular expression less useful.

Anyway, I would like to pose a followup question.
I have a character string of "ABC\D", and want to strip away the "\"
and want a returned character of "ABCD". How can I do it with gsub() ?

Thanks again.

On 9 May 2012 22:40, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 09/05/2012 4:03 AM, Wincent wrote:
>>
>> Dear all, is there any function to assert whether a file path is
>> legitimate, and to convert any potential file path to a legitimate
>> file path?
>>
>> I automate a batch of files and write them to plain text files with
>> cat(). The file argument of cat() is generated automatically which may
>> contain characters such as ?<  >, unacceptable in Windows OS. What I
>> do at this moment is to strip such characters off with gsub(). Is
>> there any direct way to make legitimate file path without detailed
>> knowledge about the naming rule specific to a OS?
>
>
> I would just try to create the file, and if you fail, it's not legitimate.
>  Alternatively, you could look at the tests that R uses when it checks a
> package:  we try to keep filenames portable to all operating systems.  The
> rules seem to be strictest for vignettes:
>
>        ## we specify ASCII filenames starting with a letter in R-exts
>        ## do this in a locale-independent way.
>        OK <-
> grep("^[ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz][ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789._-]+$",
> vignettes)
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>



-- 
Wincent Ronggui HUANG
Sociology Department of Fudan University
PhD of City University of Hong Kong
http://homepage.fudan.edu.cn/rghuang/cv/