In a variable I try to replace the "\n" (end-line) with the characters "" and "n". All this to get a variable where the end-line is replaced by the text "\n" literally.
I tried:
MyText <- gsub("\n", " \\n ", "Line1\nLine2")
But somehow I end up with: "Line1nLine2" As soon I try to replace the end-line I'm not able to get the character "" in my variable.
Tried with str_replace_all, it's the same !
Has anybody an idea ?
Cheers, E
We could use fixed = TRUE
gsub("\n", " \n ", "Line1\nLine2", fixed = TRUE)
[1] "Line1 \n Line2"
or without using the escape on replacement
gsub("\n", " \n ", "Line1\nLine2")
[1] "Line1 \n Line2"
StackOverflow seems to replace the slashes as well ;)
A regex in R usually needs to be escaped twice. For a fixed string, we still need to escape the backslash with another backslash:
gsub("\n", " \\\\n ", "Line1\nLine2")
gsub("\n", " \\n ", "Line1\nLine2", fixed = T)
It might appear that we now have two backslashes, but that's just print() escaping it for us:
> gsub("\n", " \\\\n ", "Line1\nLine2")
[1] "Line1 \\n Line2"
> test <- gsub("\n", " \\\\n ", "Line1\nLine2")
> cat(test)
Line1 \n Line2
> strsplit(test,'')
[[1]]
[1] "L" "i" "n" "e" "1" " " "\\" "n" " " "L" "i" "n" "e" "2"
... can be found for instance on the stringr regex vignette in the paragraph Escaping.