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

[Richard O'Keefe]

This isn't an R thing.  The Windows system calls that accept file names
accept both kinds of slash indifferently.  I've seen it said that this goes
back to MS-DOS 2, but certainly it's all NT versions.  If you need to link
C and/or Fortran with R, you can safely use / in file name strings in those
languages too.

On Fri, 8 May 2026 at 01:18, Chris Ryan <cwr using agencystatistical.com> wrote:

> 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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