On 15/10/2021 10:44 a.m., Michał Bojanowski wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I would be grateful if somebody could explain and perhaps help work
around the following.
I have .Renviron with, say:
AVAR=${APPDATA}/foo/bar
Which is a documented way of referring to existing environment
variables. Now, with that in R I'm getting:
I think in your example, AVAR would be set using
AVAR=C:\Users\mbojanowski\AppData\Roaming/foo/bar
When I export that value in a bash shell (on a Mac, not Windows), I get
the same thing as you saw:
$ printenv AVAR
C:UsersmbojanowskiAppDataRoaming/foo/bar
Here R was not involved at all, this is the shell eating the backslashes.
So I suppose R is following the same rules as bash (or maybe getting
bash or sh to handle .Renviron). Those rules are that the single
backslashes are treated as escapes, and so they are dropped and the
following character is preserved:
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Escape-Character.html .
I think you don't have a lot of choice here: if you don't have control
over how an environment variable is being set, then don't try to use it
in an expansion in .Renviron. If you do have control, then avoid using
backslashes.
So this would be fine:
APPDATA=C:/Users/mbojanowski/AppData/Roaming
AVAR=${APPDATA}/foo/bar
but your APPDATA setting needs to be handled in some other way, e.g. in
.Rprofile instead of .Renviron.
Duncan Murdoch
Sys.getenv("APPDATA") # That works OK
[1] "C:\\Users\\mbojanowski\\AppData\\Roaming"
so OK, but:
Sys.getenv("AVAR")
[1] "C:UsersmbojanowskiAppDataRoaming/foo/bar"
So all the (back)slashes are gone from APPDATA.
Does processing ${} removes the backslashes? I could not find anything
on that in R Windows FAQ nor on the web.
Thanks in advance!
Michal
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