Dear All, Perhaps this should go in r-package-devel, but I suspect that this is going to turn into a feature request, and I want to run it by the list before filing it in the Bugzilla.
I would like to specify a long string literal without making the line of code too long. In R, "abc def" yields the string "abc\def", and, as far as I can tell, there is no mechanism for preventing it from inserting a newline into the string. Putting a backslash before the newline, i.e., "abc\ def" eliminates the newline in (that I know of) C/C++, Python, and Julia, but it makes no difference in R. The implicit concatenation of Python and C/C++, e.g., "abc" "def", is a syntax error as well in R. It is, of course, possible to use paste0(), but is there a more concise built-in mechanism in R of which I am not aware? If not, I think it would make sense to bring R in line with the others. Currently, backslash and no backslash before a newline behave identically (at least as far as I can tell), so I doubt that a nontrivial amount of code relies on the current behaviour. [1] Any thoughts? Pavel [1] On the off chance that it does, it should easy to check by searching for "\\\n" in package sources, because a backslash before a newline is a syntax error outside a string. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel