I am trying to write in my R Markdown "3 times 6:10 and (3 times 6):10" all in complete letters (I am using times instead of *. My purpose is to put * instead of word times without any problem). However, it keeps giving me italic syntax for the part "6:10 and (3". How can I write my *s in R Markdown straight into the document without evoking * syntax which is make letters italic in the middle?
Escape '*' by using '\*' instead
Alternatively, you could use $\times$ to get the '×' symbol
On the web use *
That's one of it's HTML codes.
(Only mention it because google brought me here when I didn't search about the R language and figure others will end up here as well.)
Markdown is quite sensitive to whitespace. If you don't put spaces around the * (line 3 below) you get the problem you're describing (markdown assumes the *s are italic-delimiters).
Some possible solutions
line 5: add spaces, no problem (except you might not want that spacing)
line 7 (#CaptainHat): set times as a LaTeX times symbol
line 9: set in code format
line 11 (#CaptainHat): protect *s with backslashes
Also tried #CaptainHat's suggestions as well as type-setting in code format ...)
Related
In R: Is it possible to avoid having a blank line at the end of a text file generated by writeLines? If not, is there any other way of generating a text file from within R without having a blank line at the end?
There is no blank line.
R (correctly) ends each line with '\n' (or '\r\n' on Windows). In other words, the file consists of lines, and each line ends with a line break.
Unfortunately, there are many tools (especially on Windows) which treat such files incorrectly and display an extra line at the end. However, that’s a fault with these tools, not with R. Consequently, this shouldn’t be fixed in the R code.
As a hack to appease buggy tools, the only recourse is to set the sep argument of writeLines to the empty string, '', and insert the line breaks between lines manually (using paste).
I had exactly the same concern (different grid, though) and even your comment of the accept answer (by Konrad) did not work for me.
I found the answer here, and here is the full code:
fileConn = file("mytext.txt")
writeLines(c("line1", "line2", "line3"), sep="\n", fileConn)
#now connect to UNIX server and upload your file
library(ssh)
session=ssh_connect("user#server.com")
scp_upload(session, files="mytext.txt")
#Here is the trick, convert all the Windows extra chars to unix
ssh_exec_wait(session, command="dos2unix mytext.txt")
#Then start your Grid job
ssh_exec_wait(session, command="sbatch mytext.txt")
ssh_disconnect(session)
I am using the statement in R:
setwd("C:\\Users\\carl\\Documents\\research")
to set the working directory. It worked fine when I pasted the statement from someone else's R script but I received an error message:
Error: unexpected input in "setwd("".
when I entered the command directly or when I copied it from my script in a Word file.
It seems to be related to the fact that the double-quotes that I typed (that don't work) look a little slanted while the double-quotes in the pasted text (that work fine) look like they're straight up and down. Is there something I can do to type plain looking double-quotes instead of slanted double-quotes?
Word automatically replaces your double quotes with so-called smart quotes or curly quotes.
You need to use the regular/straight double quotes (") in r.
This support article explains how you can disable the automatic smart quote replacement in Word. In fairness though, Word is probably not the... um... ideal code editor.
I am using the statement in R:
setwd("C:\\Users\\carl\\Documents\\research")
to set the working directory. It worked fine when I pasted the statement from someone else's R script but I received an error message:
Error: unexpected input in "setwd("".
when I entered the command directly or when I copied it from my script in a Word file.
It seems to be related to the fact that the double-quotes that I typed (that don't work) look a little slanted while the double-quotes in the pasted text (that work fine) look like they're straight up and down. Is there something I can do to type plain looking double-quotes instead of slanted double-quotes?
Word automatically replaces your double quotes with so-called smart quotes or curly quotes.
You need to use the regular/straight double quotes (") in r.
This support article explains how you can disable the automatic smart quote replacement in Word. In fairness though, Word is probably not the... um... ideal code editor.
I work with knitr() and I wish to transform inline Latex commands like "\label" and "\ref", depending on the output target (Latex or HTML).
In order to do that, I need to (programmatically) generate valid R strings that correctly represent the backslash: for example "\label" should become "\\label". The goal would be to replace all backslashes in a text fragment with double-backslashes.
but it seems that I cannot even read these strings, let alone process them: if I define:
okstr <- function(str) "do something"
then when I call
okstr("\label")
I directly get an error "unrecognized escape sequence"
(of course, as \l is faultly)
So my question is : does anybody know a way to read strings (in R), without using the escaping mechanism ?
Yes, I know I could do it manually, but that's the point: I need to do it programmatically.
There are many questions that are close to this one, and I have spent some time browsing, but I have found none that yields a workable solution for this.
Best regards.
Inside R code, you need to adhere to R’s syntactic conventions. And since \ in strings is used as an escape character, it needs to form a valid escape sequence (and \l isn’t a valid escape sequence in R).
There is simply no way around this.
But if you are reading the string from elsewhere, e.g. using readLines, scan or any of the other file reading functions, you are already getting the correct string, and no handling is necessary.
Alternatively, if you absolutely want to write LaTeX-like commands in literal strings inside R, just use a different character for \; for instance, +. Just make sure that your function correctly handles it everywhere, and that you keep a way of getting a literal + back. Here’s a suggestion:
okstr("+label{1 ++ 2}")
The implementation of okstr then needs to replace single + by \, and double ++ by + (making the above result in \label{1 + 2}). But consider in which order this needs to happen, and how you’d like to treat more complex cases; for instance, what should the following yield: okstr("1 +++label")?
I am trying to read this file (3.8mb) using its fixed-width structure as described in the following link.
This command:
a <- read.fwf('~/ccsl.txt',c(2,30,6,2,30,8,10,11,6,8))
Produces an error:
line 37 did not have 10 elements
After replicating the issue with different values of the skip option, I figured that the lines causing the problem all contain the "#" symbol.
Is there any way to get around it?
As #jverzani already commented, this problem is probably the fact that the # sign often used as a character to signal a comment. Setting the comment.char input argument of read.fwf to something other than # could fix the problem. I'll leave my answer below as a more general case that you can use on any character that causes problems (e.g. the 's in the Dutch city name 's Gravenhage).
I've had this problem occur with other symbols. The approach I took was to simply replace the # by either nothing, or by a character which does not generate the error. In my case it was no problem to simply replace the character, but this might not be possible in your case.
So my approach would be to delete the symbol that generates the error, or replace by another character. This can be done using a text editor (find and replace), in an R script, or using some linux tools called grep and sed. If you want to do this in an R script, use scan or readLines to read the lines. Once the text is in memory, you can use sub to replace the character.
If you cannot replace the character, I would try the following approach: replace the character by a character that does not generate an error, read it into R using read.fwf, and finally replace the character by the # character.
Following up on the answer above: to get all characters to be read as literals, use both comment.char="" and quote="" (the latter takes care of #PaulHiemstra's problem with single-quotes in Dutch proper nouns) in the call to read.fwf (this is documented in ?read.table).