I noticed this issue in stringr::str_replace, but it also affects sub()
in base R.
If the pattern in a call to one of these needs to be a regular
expression, then backslashes in the replacement text are treated specially.
For example,
gsub("a|b", "\\", "abcdef")
gives "def", not "\\\\def" as I wanted. To get the latter, I need to
escape the replacement backslashes, e.g.
gsub("a|b", "\\\\", "abcdef")
which gives "\\\\cdef".
I have two questions:
1. Is there a variant on sub or str_replace which allows the pattern to
be declared as a regular expression, but the replacement to be declared
as fixed?
2. To get what I want, I can double the backslashes in the replacement
text. This would do that:
replacement <- gsub("\\\\", "\\\\\\\\", replacement)
Are there any other special characters to worry about besides backslashes?
Duncan Murdoch
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