[R] how to put a single backslash into a string, to make file paths usable on windows

[Rui Barradas]

Às 14:18 de 07/05/2026, Chris Ryan escreveu:
> It had been about a year since I had worked in Windows, and apparently I
> had gotten rusty. Forward slashes in path names, as in
> 
> read.csv("e:/path/to/datafileOnWindows.csv")
> 
> work just fine in R on Windows.
> 
> Sorry for the bother.
> 
> --Chris Ryan
> 
> 
> 
> Chris Ryan wrote:
>> I'm trying to generalize one of my scripts so that it will run on my
>> Linux Mint computer at home and my client's Windows 11 computer at work.
>>   I'm encountering trouble when setting file paths, conditional on which
>> computer the script is running on. It's the Windows backslash issue
>>
> 
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Hello,

Probably off-topic but you can automate switching from "\\" to "/".
If run on Windows, normalizePath uses "\\".
Then, chartr it translates to "/".


path <- normalizePath("~")
chartr("\\", "/", path)


Hope this helps,

Rui Barradas