How to read quoted text containing escaped quotes

Question

Consider the following comma separated file. For simplicity let it contain one line:

---

\'I am quoted\',\'so, can use comma inside - it is not separator h         


        

Answer 1

read_delim from package readr can handle escaped quotes, using the arguments escape_double and escape_backslash.

read_delim(file, delim=',', escape_double=FALSE, escape_backslash=TRUE, quote="'")

(Note older versions of readr do not support quoted newlines in CSV headers correctly: https://github.com/tidyverse/readr/issues/784)