R help - Apr 2009 - Removing backslashes from data

I am trying to check for backslashes in data, then remove them when I  
find them, but am having a difficult time figuring out the best way to  
do it.  I know the backslash is the escape character in R, and I  
should be able to use 'gsub' to accomplish this, but I all I seem to  
be getting are errors.  For example:

If entry is:
"Hello\World"

I want:
"HelloWorld"

There are several entries with backslashes, and I need to find them  
and delete them.  All help is welcome, thank you.

___________________________________
Drew Conway
Ph.D. Student
Department of Politics, New York University
agc282@nyu.edu
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~agc282


	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Below  works but it has two backslashes in the word. maybe someone can
   explain why the 4 and? 2 works but 2 1 doesn't ? thanks.
   gsub("\\\\","","Hello\\World",perl=TRUE)

   On Apr 3, 2009, Andrew Conway <agc282 at nyu.edu> wrote:

     I am trying to check for backslashes in data, then remove them when I
     find them, but am having a difficult time figuring out the best way to
     do it. I know the backslash is the escape character in R, and I
     should be able to use 'gsub' to accomplish this, but I all I seem
to
     be getting are errors. For example:
     If entry is:
     "Hello\World"
     I want:
     "HelloWorld"
     There are several entries with backslashes, and I need to find them
     and delete them. All help is welcome, thank you.
     ___________________________________
     Drew Conway
     Ph.D. Student
     Department of Politics, New York University
     [1]agc282 at nyu.edu
     [2]http://homepages.nyu.edu/~agc282
     [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
     ______________________________________________
     [3]R-help at r-project.org mailing list
     [4]https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
     PLEASE do read the posting guide
     [5]http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
     and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

References

   1. mailto:agc282 at nyu.edu
   2. http://homepages.nyu.edu/~agc282
   3. mailto:R-help at r-project.org
   4. https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
   5. http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html

On 4/3/2009 2:33 PM, Andrew Conway wrote:
> I am trying to check for backslashes in data, then remove them when I  
> find them, but am having a difficult time figuring out the best way to  
> do it.  I know the backslash is the escape character in R, and I  
> should be able to use 'gsub' to accomplish this, but I all I seem
to
> be getting are errors.  For example:
> 
> If entry is:
> "Hello\World"
> 
> I want:
> "HelloWorld"
> 
> There are several entries with backslashes, and I need to find them  
> and delete them.  All help is welcome, thank you.
This gets a little confusing because print() automatically doubles 
backslashes.  To see what's really going on, you need to use cat.  Then 
the following can be seen to work:

input <- "\"Hello\\World\""
cat(input, "\n")
output <- gsub("\\\\", "", input)
cat(output, "\n")

Duncan Murdoch
> 
> ___________________________________
> Drew Conway
> Ph.D. Student
> Department of Politics, New York University
> agc282 at nyu.edu
> http://homepages.nyu.edu/~agc282
> 
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> 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.