Relief from backslash irritation in R for Windows

Question

Early in my R life I discovered the pain of R and windows being on different pages when it came to the separator between directories and subdirectories. Eventhough I know about the problem, I am still pained by manually having to put a backslash in front of all my backslashes or replacing all of them with forward slashes.

I love copying a path name or an entire filename with any one of several applications that I have running on my computer (eg. XYPlorer, Everything by voidtools) and then pasting it into Tinn-R. Is there anyway that I could automate the task that I am currently doing manually.

• Is there a setting in Tinn-R?
• Is there a setting in R?
• Is there a autohotkey script that could do it for me by default?

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Background for those who don't know what I am talking about

Quoting from R for Windows FAQ, Version for R-2.9.2, B. D. Ripley and D. J. Murdoch

Backslashes have to be doubled in R character strings, so for example one needs `"d:\R-2.9.2\library\xgobi\scripts\xgobi.bat"'. You can make life easier for yourself by using forward slashes as path separators: they do work under Windows

Answer 1

I wrote a autohotkey script that is triggered by typing "rfil " - without the inverted commas.

:O:rfil:: ;replaces backslashes with forward slashes in a file name that is stored on the clipboard
StringReplace,clipboard,clipboard,\,/,All
send %clipboard%
return

If anyone can tell me a quicker way than using the send command I would appreciate it. I have an autohotkey script running all the time on all my computers so I did not have to download new software in order to run this script. I simply added it to my default script file.

I will be happy to explain what I did if you want me to.

Answer 2

ClipPath adds right-click menu options to choose which kind of slash you want to paste.

Via Getting Genetics Done, which looks like it could be a useful resource for R users in general.