Raw text strings for file paths in R

Question

Is it possible to use a prefix when specifying a filepath string in R to ignore escape characters?

For example if I want to read in the file example.csv when using windows, I need to manually change \ to / or \\. For example,

'E:\DATA\example.csv' 

becomes

'E:/DATA/example.csv'  data <- read.csv('E:/DATA/example.csv') 

In python I can prefix my string using r to avoid doing this (e.g. r'E:\DATA\example.csv'). Is there a similar command in R, or an approach that I can use to avoid having this problem. (I move between windows, mac and linux - this is just a problem on the windows OS obviously).

Answer 1

You can use file.path to construct the correct file path, independent of operating system.

file.path("E:", "DATA", "example.csv") [1] "E:/DATA/example.csv" 

It is also possible to convert a file path to the canonical form for your operating system, using normalizePath:

zz <- file.path("E:", "DATA", "example.csv") normalizePath(zz) [1] "E:\\DATA\\example.csv" 

---

But in direct response to your question: I am not aware of a way to ignore the escape sequence using R. In other words, I do not believe it is possible to copy a file path from Windows and paste it directly into R.

However, if what you are really after is a way of copying and pasting from the Windows Clipboard and get a valid R string, try readClipboard

For example, if I copy a file path from Windows Explorer, then run the following code, I get a valid file path:

zz <- readClipboard() zz [1] "C:\\Users\\Andrie\\R\\win-library\\"