A recent thread on R-help reminded me of some questions I have regarding the path separator on Windows.
The thread: [R] using paste and "\" to create a valid filename The question: What are the use-cases where "\" is required for paths passed as character vectors from within R? My experience has been that "/" always works and "\" often fails due to escaping issues (the user's fault). A pathalogical example that I _have_ encountered due to temp file naming on Windows: > badpath <- "foo\\2\\bar" > root <- "c:\\HERE\\file.txt" > gsub("HERE", badpath, root) Error in gsub("HERE", badpath, root) : invalid backreference 2 in regular expression Using file.path is recommended as a best practice, but AFAICT, it forces "\" on Windows. Why not have file.path dynamically read .Platform$file.sep so that in code that uses file.path one could modify .Platform$file.sep and change the behavior of all subsequent file.path calls? Python's os.path.join function behaves similarly to R's: changing os.sep doesn't change the behavior of os.path.join. .Platform$file.sep = "/" and change the behavior of all subsequent calls. With both languages, I've found that for glue-code type tasks, sticking to "/" on Windows is much easier and I've been frustrated by the built-in path handling function. + seth ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel