My question relates to the following question/answer from 2013: Efficiently convert backslash to forward slash in R
I posted a question to the solution proposed by 'Arun' and 'flodel' at the link above, but I am not certain it will pick up on anyone's radar particularly given the age of the proposed solution. So, I would like to ask my question as a new one.
The original problem centered around finding a way of converting a back slash to a forward slash which, for me, is a common step if I want to write an R-script and access data in a particular Windows path. Consequently, I use the proposed solution from 2013, gsub("\\", "/", x), a lot in my R-scripts. Many thanks for that!
Purely as an academic question, if I have a path with forward slashes, e.g.
pathR <- "C:/Users/jd/Documents/folder/file.txt"
Why doesn't the command:
gsub("/", "\\", pathR)
replace the forward slashes in pathR with back slashes so that I can recover the Windows path? All I get is the string with no slashes at all, i.e.: "C:UsersjdDocumentsfolderfile.txt"?
When I try the following, R prompts me with a '+' sign (see below):
> gsub("/", "\\", pathR)
[1] "C:UsersjdDocumentsfolderfile.txt"
> gsub("/", "\\\", pathR)
+
What is R expecting me to input that's missing?
Many thanks for your help.
You need to use 4 backslashes
pathR <- "C:/Users/jd/Documents/folder/file.txt"
result <- gsub("/", "\\\\", pathR)
# Default print method shows special characters escaped
result
#> [1] "C:\\Users\\jd\\Documents\\folder\\file.txt"
# Use cat() to show the result without escape characters
cat(result)
#> C:\Users\jd\Documents\folder\file.txt