CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
stevec
stevec

Reputation: 52268

Create a string from characters that contain both single and double quotes?

Is there a way to create a string from some text that contains both single ' and double " quote characters?

Example

Suppose we some text containing both single and double quotes (presume an actual use case would be much longer):

Here's a message: "hello, world!"

Wrapping it in ', or " doesn't work:

thing <- "Here's a message: "hello, world!""
Error: unexpected symbol in "thing <- "Here's a message: "hello"

thing <- 'Here's a message: "hello, world!"'
Error: unexpected symbol in "thing <- 'Here's"

I can think of two ways that would probably work. 1. Dump the text into RStudio (or a text editor) and find and replace. 2. Paste into a text file and read in the lines with readLines(). I just wanted to see if there's an easier way

Upvotes: 6

Views: 1008

Answers (3)

user10917479
user10917479

Reputation:

If you have a version 4.0.0 or later R, you can use r"(all of your text here)".

text <- r"(My text "has" double and 'single' quotes)"

> cat(text)
My text "has" double and 'single' quotes

Documentation for this can be found by running help("Quotes").

Upvotes: 8

SirSaleh
SirSaleh

Reputation: 1604

You can simply escape the characters using backslash "":

thing <- "Here's a message: \"hello, world!\""

now you can print the variable using cat:

cat(thing)

don't worry if the R console shows the backslash characters, because they not actually part of the string


> xx <- "\""
> xx
[1] "\""

> length(xx)
[1] 1 # you see it is just one character! :)

Upvotes: 2

Dason
Dason

Reputation: 61933

If you're inputting directly into the console then you'll just want to escape the quotes using a backslash. Here's an example:

> text <- "Here\'s a message: \"hello, world!\""
> cat(text, "\n") # Adding a new line so the prompt doesn't mess things up
Here's a message: "hello, world!"

Upvotes: 2

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