R help - Sep 2011 - switching off commands within character vector

Hello,

could someone help me with this problem?:

I would like to create a latex-script inside of a character vector in order
to being able to compilate it within latex in the end.

if i try the following commands:

l1 <- "Hello world"
latexscript <- paste("\c",l1,"\c")

... I get an error message. I think the problem is that r sees \c as a
command.

How can I get

"\c Hello world \c"

as a result without getting the error message?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Marion

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On 11-09-19 7:30 AM, Marion Wenty wrote:
> Hello,
>
> could someone help me with this problem?:
>
> I would like to create a latex-script inside of a character vector in order
> to being able to compilate it within latex in the end.
>
> if i try the following commands:
>
> l1<- "Hello world"
> latexscript<- paste("\c",l1,"\c")
>
> ... I get an error message. I think the problem is that r sees \c as a
> command.
>
> How can I get
>
> "\c Hello world \c"
>
> as a result without getting the error message?
Here's the long answer:

R uses \ as an "escape character", which is different from the way
LaTeX
uses it.  The string "\n" contains a single character (a newline 
character.  When you say "\c", the parser thinks you are asking for a 
single character which is written as \c, but there isn't one, so you get 
the error message.

To put the characters \c into a string, you need to escape the 
backslash, i.e. use "\\c".  That's a two character string.  It
will
print as "\\c" using print(), but if you use cat() you will see the 
actual characters \c.

The short answer is:

latexscript <- paste("\\c", l1, "\\c")
cat(latexscript, "\n")

Duncan Murdoch