[R] sprintf doesn't care of escape characters

Jeff Newmiller jdnewmil at dcn.davis.CA.us
Mon Jul 30 20:20:18 CEST 2012


I am unable to determine what you think the problem is from your description.

A wild guess is that you just don't know what you are looking at in the output. Do you understand the difference between the output of the "print" function and of the "cat" function? Try

cat( sprintf("a\"bc\"d") )

and

print ( sprintf("a\"bc\"d") )

In a nutshell, print makes the string suitable for inclusion in source code, while cat sends the string directly as-is.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Newmiller                        The     .....       .....  Go Live...
DCN:<jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us>        Basics: ##.#.       ##.#.  Live Go...
                                      Live:   OO#.. Dead: OO#..  Playing
Research Engineer (Solar/Batteries            O.O#.       #.O#.  with
/Software/Embedded Controllers)               .OO#.       .OO#.  rocks...1k
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

Edwin Helbert Aponte Angarita <helbert2a at gmail.com> wrote:

>Hi.
>
>I am having trouble with something that should be simple. I am unable
>to get sprintf using escape sequences:
>
>> sprintf("a\nb")
>[1] "a\nb"
>
>> sprintf("a\"bc\"d")
>[1] "a\"bc\"d"
>
>But it seems to need them any way:
>
>> sprintf("a\"bc"d")
>Error: unexpected symbol in "sprintf("a\"bc"d"
>
>Any suggestion on how to solve this issue?
>
>My R system:
>> version
>               _
>platform       x86_64-suse-linux-gnu
>arch           x86_64
>os             linux-gnu
>system         x86_64, linux-gnu
>status
>major          2
>minor          15.0
>year           2012
>month          03
>day            30
>svn rev        58871
>language       R
>version.string R version 2.15.0 (2012-03-30)
>
>Thanks.
>
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>and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.



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