R equivalent for .NET's Environment.NewLine - r

Is there an R equivalent for Environment.NewLine in .NET?
I'm looking for a character object that would represent a new line based on the environment, e.g. CR LF ("\r\n") on Windows and LF ("\n") on Unix. I couldn't find any such thing in the R documentation, or the default R options.

There’s no equivalent, but most of the time you won’t need it: as long as you’re writing to a text connection, the operating system will do the correct thing and treat '\n' according to the platform’s specification; for example, the documentation of writeLines says:
Normally writeLines is used with a text-mode connection, and the default separator is converted to the normal separator for that platform (LF on Unix/Linux, CRLF on Windows).

The \n should still work:
> s = "line 1\nline 2"
> cat(s)
line 1
line 2
Here's a separate question which explains that print(s) doesn't quite work when trying to output strings with escape characters, and we should use cat or writeLine instead: Printing newlines with print() in R

Related

R customize error message when string contains unrecognized escape

I would like to give a more informative error message when users of my R functions supply a string with an unrecognized escape
my_string <- "sql\sql"
# Error: '\s' is an unrecognized escape in character string starting ""sql\s"
Something like this would be ideal.
my_string <- "sql\sql"
# Error: my_string contains an unrecognized escape. Try sql\\sql with double backslashes instead.
I have tried an if statement that looks for single backslashes
if (stringr::str_detect("sql\sql", "\")) stop("my error message")
but I get the same error.
Almost all of my users are Windows users running R 3.3 and up.
Code execution in R happens in two phases. First, R takes the raw string you enter and parses that into commands that can be run; then, R actually runs those commands. The parsing step makes sure what you've written actually makes sense as code. If it doesn't make any sense, then R can't even turn it into anything it can attempt to run.
The error message you are getting about the unrecognized escape sequence is happening at the parsing stage. That means R isn't really even attempting to execute the command, it just straight up can't understand what you are saying. There is no way to catch in error like this in code because there's no user code that's running at that point.
So if you are counting on your users writing code like my_string <- "something", then they need to write valid code. They can't change how strings are encoded or what the assignment operator looks like or how variables can be named. They also can't type !my_string! <=== %something% because R can't parse that either. R can't parse my_string <- "sql\sql" but it can parse my_string <- "sql\\sql" (slashes much be escaped in string literals). If they are not savy users, you might want to consider providing an alternative interface that can sanitize user input before trying to run it as code. Maybe make a shiny front end or have users pass arguments to your scripts via command line parameters.
If you're capturing your user input correctly, for a string input of\, R will store that in my_string as \\.
readline()
\
[1] "\\"
readline()
sql\sql
[1] "sql\\sql"
That means internally in R:
my_string <- "sql\\sql"
However
cat(my_string)
sql\sql
To check the input, you need to escape each escape, because you're looking for \\
stringr::str_detect(my_string, "\\\\")
Which returns TRUE if the input string is sql\sql. So the full line is:
if (stringr::str_detect("sql\\sql", "\\\\")) stop("my error message")

Error while Scilab module is loading

I downloaded module Metanet 0.6.2 and ran by Scilab
atomsInstall
After that i ran
`atomsLoad('metanet')`
but it shows
atomsLoad: An error occurred while loading 'metanet-0.6.2':
error(msprintf(gettext('%s module required."),'graph'));
^^
Error: Heterogeneous string detected, starting with ' and ending with ".
at line 335 of function atomsLoad ( D:\Program Files\scilab-6.0.1\modules\atoms\macros\atomsLoad.sci line 351 )
Why did it happen so?
It turns out that the metanet module is not supported by Scilab 6.0.1 yet. I had to install version 5.5.2.
Unfortunately, both the question and the accepted answer here on this page are very vague and misleading. Ideally, this kind of post should be blocked / down-voted, but I will try to answer it as much as I can.
Firstly when you want to run a Scilab command you do not put it in quotation marks, unless you want to use execstr command. However, the characters you have used are not quotations but backticks! I'm not sure why you have done that.
Secondly, the error:
Error: Heterogeneous string detected, starting with ' and ending with "
happens when a double quotation is used inside the single quotation or vice versa:
"This is a' string"
'this is a" string'
to solve the issue you should change the above strings to
"This is a'' string"
'this is a'" string'
basically adding one single quotation before any of the ' and " characters to turn them into literal ' and ".
bonus point if you want to pass a string to Tcl use curly brackets
TCL_EvalStr("set myVar {Hello World!}")
or
TCL_EvalStr("set myVar '"Hello World!'"")
but for PowerShell
powershell('$myVar= ''Hello World!''')
or
powershell("$myVar= ''Hello World!''")

Add a newline to a string in Scilab

Create a simple string in Scilab containing a newline.
Seems simple enough, but Scilab only seems to interpret escape sequences through printf style functions and msprintf / sprintf splits the string into a vector of strings at the newline!
The only way I can see to achieve this is to actually write a newline out to a file and read it back in again. Surely there is a simpler way to do this!
Ok, found it. The ascii function will do the job, a newline can be added via its ascii decimal -
str = 'hello' + ascii(10) + 'world'

Paste "25 \%" in R for further processing in LaTeX

I want a character variable in R taking the value from, lets say "a", and adding " \%", to create a %-sign later in LaTeX.
Usually I'd do something like:
a <- 5
paste(a,"\%")
but this fails.
Error: '\%' is an unrecognized escape in character string starting "\%"
Any ideas? A workaround would be to define another command giving the %-sign in LaTeX, but I'd prefer a solution within R.
As many other languages, certain characters in strings have a different meaning when they're escaped. One example for that is \n, which means newline instead of n. When you write \%, R tries to interpret % as a special character and fails doing so. You might want to try to escape the backslash, so that it is just a backslash:
paste(a, "\\%")
You can read on escape sequences here.
You can also look at the latexTranslate function from the Hmisc package, which will escape special characters from strings to make them LaTeX-compatible :
R> latexTranslate("You want to give me 100$ ? I agree 100% !")
[1] "You want to give me 100\\$ ? I agree 100\\% !"

File path issues in R using Windows ("Hex digits in character string" error)

I run R on Windows, and have a csv file on the Desktop. I load it as follows,
x<-read.csv("C:\Users\surfcat\Desktop\2006_dissimilarity.csv",header=TRUE)
but the R gives the following error message
Error: '\U' used without hex digits in character string starting "C:\U"
So what's the correct way to load this file. I am using Vista
replace all the \ with \\.
it's trying to escape the next character in this case the U so to insert a \ you need to insert an escaped \ which is \\
Please do not mark this response as correct as smitec has already answered correctly. I'm including a convenience function I keep in my .First library that makes converting a windows path to the format that works in R (the methods described by Sacha Epskamp). Simply copy the path to your clipboard (ctrl + c) and then run the function as pathPrep(). No need for an argument. The path is printed to your console correctly and written to your clipboard for easy pasting to a script. Hope this is helpful.
pathPrep <- function(path = "clipboard") {
y <- if (path == "clipboard") {
readClipboard()
} else {
cat("Please enter the path:\n\n")
readline()
}
x <- chartr("\\", "/", y)
writeClipboard(x)
return(x)
}
Solution
Try this: x <- read.csv("C:/Users/surfcat/Desktop/2006_dissimilarity.csv", header=TRUE)
Explanation
R is not able to understand normal windows paths correctly because the "\" has special meaning - it is used as escape character to give following characters special meaning (\n for newline, \t for tab, \r for carriage return, ..., have a look here ).
Because R does not know the sequence \U it complains. Just replace the "\" with "/" or use an additional "\" to escape the "\" from its special meaning and everything works smooth.
Alternative
On windows, I think the best thing to do to improve your workflow with windows specific paths in R is to use e.g. AutoHotkey which allows for custom hotkeys:
define a Hotkey, e.g. Cntr-Shift-V
assigns it an procedure that replaces backslashes within your Clipboard with
slaches ...
when ever you want to copy paste a path into R you can use Cntr-Shift-V instead of Cntr-V
Et-voila
AutoHotkey Code Snippet (link to homepage)
^+v::
StringReplace, clipboard, clipboard, \, /, All
SendInput, %clipboard%
My Solution is to define an RStudio snippet as follows:
snippet pp
"`r gsub("\\\\", "\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\", readClipboard())`"
This snippet converts backslashes \ into double backslashes \\. The following version will work if you prefer to convert backslahes to forward slashes /.
snippet pp
"`r gsub("\\\\", "/", readClipboard())`"
Once your preferred snippet is defined, paste a path from the clipboard by typing p-p-TAB-ENTER (that is pp and then the tab key and then enter) and the path will be magically inserted with R friendly delimiters.
Replace back slashes \ with forward slashes / when running windows machine
I know this is really old, but if you are copying and pasting anyway, you can just use:
read.csv(readClipboard())
readClipboard() escapes the back-slashes for you. Just remember to make sure the ".csv" is included in your copy, perhaps with this:
read.csv(paste0(readClipboard(),'.csv'))
And if you really want to minimize your typing you can use some functions:
setWD <- function(){
setwd(readClipboard())
}
readCSV <- function(){
return(readr::read_csv(paste0(readClipboard(),'.csv')))
}
#copy directory path
setWD()
#copy file name
df <- readCSV()
Replacing backslash with forward slash worked for me on Windows.
The best way to deal with this in case of txt file which contains data for text mining (speech, newsletter, etc.) is to replace "\" with "/".
Example:
file<-Corpus(DirSource("C:/Users/PRATEEK/Desktop/training tool/Text Analytics/text_file_main"))
I think that R is reading the '\' in the string as an escape character. For example \n creates a new line within a string, \t creates a new tab within the string.
'\' will work because R will recognize this as a normal backslash.
readClipboard() works directly too. Copy the path into your clipboard
C:\Users\surfcat\Desktop\2006_dissimilarity.csv
Then
readClipboard()
appears as
[1] "C:\\Users\\surfcat\\Desktop\\2006_dissimilarity.csv"
A simple way is to use python.
in python terminal type
r"C:\Users\surfcat\Desktop\2006_dissimilarity.csv"
and you'll get back
'C:\Users\surfcat\Desktop\2006_dissimilarity.csv'

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