On 05/02/2013 12:49 PM, Seth Dickey wrote:
I thought that I can use metacharacters such as \w to match word characters
with one backslash. But for some reason, I need to include two backslashes.
> grepl(pattern='\w', x="what")
Error: '\w' is an unrecognized escape in character string starting "\w"
> grepl(pattern='\\w', x="what")
[1] TRUE
I can't find the reason for this on the help pages. Does anyone know why?
grepl wants a string containing a single backslash. R uses the
backslash as an escape character, so you need to double it in your
source, so the string ends up containing just one.
"\w" is interpreted by R as an escaped w, which doesn't make sense.
"\\w" is interpreted by R as a backslash followed by a w, and then the
\w is interpreted by grepl the way you want.
Duncan Murdoch
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