How can I get rid of one backslash in a string in R?

Question

How can I remove all backslashes from this string?

t1 <- "1\2\3\4\5"

Output:

"1\002\003\004\005"

desired output:

"1002003004005"

Thank you!

@Pascal you can verify it using `writeLines(t1)`. Unable to share you the output as those as unicodes. Try yourself. — nikn8, May 04 '20 at 02:36
Really, getting that output from that input is not easy or advisable on a few levels. You could perhaps start with `sub("^[^]]*\\]\\s*", "", capture.output(charToRaw(t1)))`, which yields `"31 02 03 04 05"`, but that's obviously flawed due to the `31` (which is the raw bit encoding for the `"1"` character). It's easy enough string-wise to convert spaces and such, but ... to me, it sounds like there might be wrong assumptions about that data if you want `"1002"` from `"1\2"`. — r2evans, May 04 '20 at 02:47

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 04 '20 at 02:47

1

Here you go.

stringr::str_remove_all(stringi::stri_escape_unicode(t1), "\\\\u0")

gives output as

[1] "1002003004005"

answered May 04 '20 at 02:47

nikn8

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 04 '20 at 03:04

This one is tricky, because "1\002\003\004\005" isn't really a valid string to begin with. To see this:

> writeLines(t1)
1

However, we can first deparse it to create valid string.

t2 <- deparse(t1)
> t2
[1] "\"1\\002\\003\\004\\005\""

And then use a regular gsub to remove the \ and quotes we added as a side effect.

t3 = gsub('\\', '', t2, fixed = TRUE)
t3 = gsub('\"', '', t3)

More ideally, we'd write a compound regex.

t3 = gsub('[(\")(\\)]', '', t2)
> t3
[1] "1002003004005"

Edit: As a oneliner:

gsub('[(\")(\\)]', '', deparse(t1))

You can refer below link for more details on the pattern mapping using gsub:

2 Answers2