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Kai Feng Chew
Kai Feng Chew

Reputation: 779

Solve the Double qoutes within double quotes issue in R

With R, when we put double quotes inside a double quotes:

y <- " " " "

It will end out

Error: unexpected string constant in "y <- " " " ""

My question is how to remove all the double quotes detected or convert into single quotes within the main double quotes.

For example:

y <- "I'm watching "Prometheus"." 
y

The desired result is

#[1] "I'm watching Prometheus."

or

#[1] "I'm watching 'Prometheus'."

Upvotes: 6

Views: 4218

Answers (4)

Maloccoda
Maloccoda

Reputation: 1

I used a combination of \ and single quotes around double quotes in a similar situation I had.

I wanted to pass the following string into a function as a test

"count(grepl("[()']", df$var)==T)>0"

but the [()'] became unquoted, the solution was

"count(grepl("'[()']'", df$var)==T)>0"

Upvotes: 0

DunderChief
DunderChief

Reputation: 726

y <-  "I\'m watching 'Prometheus'."

[1] "I'm watching 'Prometheus'."

y <-  "I\'m watching Prometheus."

[1] "I'm watching Prometheus."

Upvotes: 1

Davy Kavanagh
Davy Kavanagh

Reputation: 4939

Are you parsing string input from a file or standard input of something?

scan(what='character',sep='\n') will read data from the stdin() and automatically escape the quotes. Same if from a file

>scan(what="character",sep="\n",allowEscapes=T)
1: I'm watching "Prometheus"
2: 
Read 1 item
[1] "I'm watching \"Prometheus\""
>
>scan(what="character",sep="\n",allowEscapes=T)
1: "I'm watching "Prometheus""
2: 
Read 1 item
[1] "\"I'm watching \"Prometheus\"\""

Once you've got your input you could use a regular expression to replace the escaped inner quotes... (I think! - might be a complicated reg exp)

Upvotes: 5

shhhhimhuntingrabbits
shhhhimhuntingrabbits

Reputation: 7475

Im probably not getting it but 

gsub("\"","","I'm watching \"Prometheus\".")

or

gsub("\"","'","I'm watching \"Prometheus\".")

?

Upvotes: 4

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