[R] Backslash \ in string

Claudia Beleites cbeleites at units.it
Thu Jul 15 23:43:00 CEST 2010


Jannis,

> You are right, it does not seem to matter. When the R string contains
> two \\, xtable prints it as only one \. I should have looked into the
> Latex output before posting!


'\\' is just _one_ character in R:
  > nchar ("\\")
[1] 1

Just like '\n' etc.

It is just the `print`ed (as opposed to cat) output that mislead you:
the print function displays a bunch of special characters in their 
backslash-escaped fashion:

 > print ("someting\tblah\\blubb\n")
[1] "someting\tblah\\blubb\n"
 > cat ("someting\tblah\\blubb\n")
someting	blah\blubb
 > print ("\12")
[1] "\n"

Claudia



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