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I am trying to get two strings that contain quotations ("") combined as a character/string vector or with R function paste so I can plug the result in the argument x of writeFormula in openxlsx package.

An example is like this

paste('HYPERLINK("file)',':///"&path!$C$1&TRIM(MID(CELL("filename",B',sep="")

and I hope that it should produce the result like this

HYPERLINK("file:///"&path!$C$1&TRIM(MID(CELL("filename",B

but it actually produces the result with a backslash in front of the ":

[1] "HYPERLINK(\"file):///\"&path!$C$1&TRIM(MID(CELL(\"filename\",B"

I have searched for many potential solutions like replace paste with cat or add noquote function in front of paste but the output is not a character vector. Functions like toString or as.character could convert these results to strings but the backslash comes back as well.

Really appreciate any helps with this. Thanks.

Leon
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    There is no slash. \" is just " with an escape character in front of it. Try `cat(paste(...))` – thelatemail Jul 28 '17 at 00:30
  • Hi thelatemail, thanks for the answer. I had tried that before, but as I said, function cat and noquote cannot produce a character/string vector. – Leon Jul 28 '17 at 00:40
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    There isn't a slash in the string. When R print's the value to the screen, it adds it. Your paste is working just fine. Use `cat()` instead of the default print to see that, not instead of the paste: `cat(paste('HYPERLINK("file)',':///"&path!$C$1&TRIM(MID(CELL("filename",B',sep=""))`. But the `cat()` is only for printing to the screen. The result from paste is what you want. Check out [this FAQ](http://www.hep.by/gnu/r-patched/r-faq/R-FAQ_88.html) – MrFlick Jul 28 '17 at 00:45
  • Please re-read the postings you found. You clearly did not read them with sufficient care. `grep("\\\\", "\'")` will return FALSE. So ... NO SLASH. – IRTFM Jul 28 '17 at 02:16

1 Answers1

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There are no backslashes in p. The backslashes you see are just how R displays a quote (so that you know that the quote is part of the string and not the ending delimiter) but are not in the string itself.

p <- paste0('HYPERLINK("file)', ':///"&path!$C$1&TRIM(MID(CELL("filename",B')
p
## [1] "HYPERLINK(\"file):///\"&path!$C$1&TRIM(MID(CELL(\"filename\",B"

# no backslashes are found in p
grepl("\\", p, fixed = TRUE)
## [1] FALSE

noquote(p), cat(p, "\n") or writeLines(p) can be used to display the string without the backslash escapes:

noquote(p)
## [1] HYPERLINK("file):///"&path!$C$1&TRIM(MID(CELL("filename",B

cat(p, "\n")
## HYPERLINK("file):///"&path!$C$1&TRIM(MID(CELL("filename",B 

writeLines(p)
## HYPERLINK("file):///"&path!$C$1&TRIM(MID(CELL("filename",B

One can see the individual characters separated by spaces like this. We see that there are no backslashes:

do.call(cat, c(strsplit(p, ""), "\n"))
## H Y P E R L I N K ( " f i l e ) : / / / " & p a t h ! $ C $ 1 & T R I M ( M I D ( C E L L ( " f i l e n a m e " , B

As another example here p2 contains one double quote and has a single character in it, not 2:

p2 <- '"'
p2
## [1] "\""

nchar(p2)
## [1] 1
G. Grothendieck
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  • Thanks for the detailed explanations. There is indeed no slash when plugging the output of paste function in the argument I used. Also, thank MrFlick, thelatemail, and 42 for your short answers. – Leon Jul 28 '17 at 02:41