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Escape sequences

You might have been surprised at the output from the last part of the last exercise. How did you get two lines from one string, and how did you get that little globe? The key is the \.

A sequence in a string that starts with a \ is called an escape sequence and allows us to include special characters in our strings. You saw one escape sequence in the first exercise: \" is used to denote a double quote.

In "hello\n\U1F30D" there are two escape sequences: \n gives a newline, and \U followed by up to 8 hex digits sequence denotes a particular Unicode character.

Unicode is a standard for representing characters that might not be on your keyboard. Each available character has a Unicode code point: a number that uniquely identifies it. These code points are generally written in hex notation, that is, using base 16 and the digits 0-9 and A-F. You can find the code point for a particular character by looking up a code chart. If you only need four digits for the codepoint, an alternative escape sequence is \u.

When R comes across a \ it assumes you are starting an escape, so if you actually need a backslash in your string you'll need the sequence \\.

This is a part of the course

“String Manipulation with stringr in R”

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Exercise instructions

  • Edit the string inside writeLines() so that it correctly displays (all on one line):

    To have a \ you need \\

  • Edit the string inside writeLines() so that it correctly displays (with the line breaks in these positions)

    This is a really 
really really 
long string

  • Try writeLines() with the string containing Unicode characters: "\u0928\u092e\u0938\u094d\u0924\u0947 \u0926\u0941\u0928\u093f\u092f\u093e". You just said "Hello World" in Hindi!

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Should display: To have a \ you need \\
writeLines("To have a \ you need \\")

# Should display: 
# This is a really 
# really really 
# long string
writeLines("This is a really really really long string")

# Use writeLines() with 
# "\u0928\u092e\u0938\u094d\u0924\u0947 \u0926\u0941\u0928\u093f\u092f\u093e"
___
Edit and Run Code

This exercise is part of the course

String Manipulation with stringr in R

IntermediateSkill Level
4.4+
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Learn how to pull character strings apart, put them back together and use the stringr package.

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You'll start with some basics: how to enter strings in R, how to control how numbers are transformed to strings, and finally how to combine strings together to produce output that combines text and nicely formatted numbers.

Exercise 1: Welcome!Exercise 2: QuotesExercise 3: What you see isn't always what you haveExercise 4: Escape sequences
Exercise 5: Turning numbers into stringsExercise 6: Using format() with numbersExercise 7: Controlling other aspects of the stringExercise 8: formatC()Exercise 9: Putting strings togetherExercise 10: Annotation of numbersExercise 11: A very simple tableExercise 12: Let's order pizza!

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