Can R paste() output “\”?

Question

As stated in the Intro to R manual,

paste(\"\\\\\")

prints

[1] \"\\\\\"

Is it possible for paste to prin

Answer 1

You are confusing how something is stored and how it "prints".

You can use paste to combine a \ with something else, but if you print it then the printed representation will have \ to escape the \, but if you output it to a file or the screen using cat instead, then you get the single \, for example:

> tmp <- paste( "\\", "cite{", sep="" )
> print(tmp)
[1] "\\cite{"
> cat(tmp, "\n")
\cite{