> -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces@r- > project.org] On Behalf Of bonnieyuan > Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 2:04 PM > To: r-help@r-project.org > Subject: [R] how to manually enter an double quote as data feed? > > I'm doing a text mining project where I have to manually enter a double > quote > as an element inside a vector. > > I tried > > char[10]='"'#where i enclosed the double quote in a pair of single > quotes. > > But the result is [1] "\"". Somehow a back slash is added > automatically. > > I also tried to enclose the double quote in a pair of double quotes. > That > didn't work either. > > I'm using Mac and latest release of R. > > Thank you! > > Bonnie Yuan >
Bonnie, The backslach character in not actually there. Since the double quote character has special meaning in R, it needs to be 'escaped' to change its special meaning to become a literal double quote character. That is the function of the \ escape character. Try the following s1 <- '"' #assign as you did s2 <- "\"" #assign using escape character s1 #displays with backslash nchar(s1) #but there is only 1 character in the string s2 nchar(s2) print(s1) #prints backslash indicating literal double quote cat(s1,'\n') #cat function displays without the backslash #notice n character is escaped, creating a newline character Hope this is helpful, Dan Daniel J. Nordlund Washington State Department of Social and Health Services Planning, Performance, and Accountability Research and Data Analysis Division Olympia, WA 98504-5204 ______________________________________________ R-help@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.