Thanks for replied from you all. I 've got better understanding of what cat/paste does. what I am trying is to make FASTA format data. i.e. for each line starting with '>', add '\n' at both ends while get rid of all '\n's for the rest.
e.g. this is original messy data, I need to remove newlines within the text bodies: >no1 this is the first entry ('\n') but here is extra newline('\n') and also here that we need to remove. >no2 this is the second entry, which is fine in format. >no3 .... Of course, perl would be good at this, but I want to try with R for the other reason. thanks. Duncan Murdoch-2 wrote: > > On 19/07/2007 7:41 PM, runner wrote: >> It is ok to bury a reg expression '\n' when using 'cat', but not 'paste'. >> e.g. >> >> cat ('I need to move on to a new line', '\n', 'at here') # change line! >> paste ('I need to move on to a new line', '\n', 'at here') # '\n' is just >> a >> character as it is. >> >> Is there a way around pasting '\n' ? Thanks a lot. > > What do you want to get? Do you want a two element vector? Then use > c(). Do you want a one element vector that prints on two lines? Use > either form, they both work (but you need to use cat() to do the display). > > > x <- paste ('I need to move on to a new line', '\n', 'at here') > > cat(x) > I need to move on to a new line > at here> > > -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/can-I-paste-%27newline%27--tf4114350.html#a11712720 Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.