R: How to replace . in a string?

Question

I have a string say \"a.b\" and I want to replace \".\" with \"_\".

gsub(\".\",\"_\",\"a.b\")

doesn\'t work as . matches all characters.

Answer 1

. matches any character. Escape . using \ to match . literally.

\ itself is also should be escaped:

> gsub("\\.", "_", "a.b")
[1] "a_b"