I am trying to paste together a path-string. Like this "C:\testfile.txt"
This doesn't work at all:
filename <- "testfile.txt"
path <- paste("C:\",filename,sep="")
This also doesn't produce the right result:
filename <- "testfile.txt"
path <- paste("C:\\",filename,sep="")
[1] "C:\\testfile.txt"
Can you help me to prudece a path-string with only one backslash?
This works:
> paste("C:\\",filename,sep="")
[1] "C:\\testfile.txt"
Although you see TWO backslashes, there's really only one there, because usually when printed a backslash means "the next character is encoding a special character". In this case the special character is literally a backslash.
You can see this by counting the number of characters in two backslashes:
> nchar("\\")
[1] 1
And anyway you should probably be using file.path to construct paths and not fiddling around with backslashes:
> file.path("C:",filename)
[1] "C:/testfile.txt"
(Note forward slashes here also work in Windows and don't suffer from having to be backslash-encoded).
