Escaping backslash (\) in string or paths in R

Question

Windows copies path with backslash \\, which R does not accept. So, I wanted to write a function which would convert \\ to /. For exam

Answer 1

Your fundamental problem is that R will signal an error condition as soon as it sees a single back-slash before any character other than a few lower-case letters, backslashes themselves, quotes or some conventions for entering octal, hex or Unicode sequences. That is because the interpreter sees the back-slash as a message to "escape" the usual translation of characters and do something else. If you want a single back-slash in your character element you need to type 2 backslashes. That will create one backslash:

nchar("\\")
#[1] 1

The "Character vectors" section of _Intro_to_R_ says:

"Character strings are entered using either matching double (") or single (') quotes, but are printed using double quotes (or sometimes without quotes). They use C-style escape sequences, using \ as the escape character, so \ is entered and printed as \, and inside double quotes " is entered as \". Other useful escape sequences are \n, newline, \t, tab and \b, backspace—see ?Quotes for a full list."

 ?Quotes