Hi, When you call paste without assigning the value it returns to anything it runs through the print command. So, while your string may contain escapes, using print will not present escapes as you are expecting them. In this case you could wrap cat() around your paste command.
> cat(paste(fname, '\\', lname), "\n") John \ Smith See FAQ 7.37 http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Why-does-backslash-behave-strangely-inside-strings_003f Cheers, Ben > sessionInfo() R version 3.1.0 (2014-04-10) Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.1.0 (64-bit) locale: [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8 attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] tools_3.1.0 On Dec 6, 2014, at 2:00 PM, Prof J C Nash (U30A) <nas...@uottawa.ca> wrote: > This is NOT critical. It arose due to a fumble fingers when developing > an R example, but slightly intriguing. > > How could one build a string from substrings with a single backslash (\) > as separator. Here's the reproducible example: > > fname = "John"; lname = "Smith" > paste(fname, lname) > paste(fname, lname, sep=" / ") > # BUT there's a glitch with backslash > paste(fname, lname, sep=" \ ") # because of escaping character > paste(fname, lname, sep=' \ ') > paste(fname, lname, sep=' \\ ') # because of escaping character > bslash <- "\\" > print(bslash) > paste(fname, lname, sep=bslash) > > Possibly the answer is that R never allows a single backslash in its > strings, but I can imagine possible cases where I might want to output > such lines, for example, in documenting this. > > Best, JN > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > 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. Ben Tupper Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences 60 Bigelow Drive, P.O. Box 380 East Boothbay, Maine 04544 http://www.bigelow.org ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.
