CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rdataframetextformattingquotation-marks
stats_noob
stats_noob

Reputation: 5935

R: dealing with " " symbols

I am using the R programming language. I am copying text data from a website that contains many quotation marks, i.e. "" . When I try to create a data frame that contains this text, I will get an error because of conflicting "" symbols.

For example:

a <- " "blah" blah blah"

Error: unexpected symbol in "a <- " "blah"

Normally, I would have tried to use the gsub() function to remove these quotation marks from the data frame, but I can not even create the data frame to begin with. Of course, I could bring this text into a word processing software and click " ctrl + H" to replace all quotation marks ("") with an empty space (). But is there a way to do this in R itself?

Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 231

Answers (1)

Tim Biegeleisen
Tim Biegeleisen

Reputation: 522646

The typical way you would handle this would be to escape the literal double quotes with backslash:

a <- " \"blah\" blah blah"
[1] " \"blah\" blah blah"

You could also wrap your string literal inside single quotes and then not even have to escape the double quotes:

a <- ' \"blah\" blah blah'
[1] " \"blah\" blah blah"

Upvotes: 1

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