[R] How to remove backslash

[Rui Barradas]

Hello,

The backslash is not a character of the string str. test it with nchar:

str = '<span id=\"ctl00'
nchar(str)
#[1] 15


It is there just to escape the double quotes.
if you want a backslash you would need to escape it, like in str1.


str1 = '<span id=\\"ctl00'
nchar(str1)
#[1] 16


Now yes, you can remove it.

str2 <- gsub("\\", "", str1, fixed = TRUE)
identical(str, str2)
#[1] TRUE



Hope this helps,

Rui Barradas

Às 11:34 de 21/09/2018, Christofer Bogaso escreveu:
> Hi,
> 
> I have below string where I am trying to remove Backslash from. I tried
> with gsub() function, however failed to remove that:
> 
>> str = '<span id=\"ctl00'
>> gsub("\\", "", str)
> Error in gsub("\\", "", str) :
>    invalid regular expression '\', reason 'Trailing backslash'
> 
> 
> Any pointer to the right approach?
> 
> Thanks for your time
> 
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