Now I understand. Not really a solution, but you can instruct students to use only forward slashes in their paths since R will convert to backslash on Windows systems automatically. After a couple of broken commands, they should get the hang of it.
David C -----Original Message----- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Knut Krueger Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2014 11:05 AM To: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] \ escape sequence and windows path Am 20.05.2014 17:32, schrieb Bert Gunter: >> paste("a","b",sep="\\") ## "\\" is the escaped single backslash > [1] "a\\b" >> cat(paste("a","b",sep="\\")) > a\b > > Does this help clarify? Or have i misunderstood you? @David and @Bert unfortunately yes. My question is more a system level question as about any converting functions. The question is how to paste a windows path directly into an R script (without readline() or readClipboard() and how could I convert this string that it is usable in R. Means any function which is not using escape characters it seems to be possible for readline() an readClipboard(). I do not want to use y=readline() I do want to use y=foo("c:\foo1\foo2\") but this seems to be impossible because R is interpreting one backslash as escape sequence. So how does readline() and readClipboard() are working? Is there any other callback from utils which is able to deal with this? I am afraid there is no way. The reason is to prevent errors for beginning windows R user. If the path is long they either forget to convert one backslash or all and then they are frustrated that it is not working. And telling them to use search and replace ... Whatever they would replace it might be worse than before ;-) regards Knut ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
