Relief from backslash irritation in R for Windows

Question

Early in my R life I discovered the pain of R and windows being on different pages when it came to the separator between directories and subdirectories. Eventhough I know about

Answer 1

I've adapted the following autohotkey code shared to replace all backslashes with forward slashes whenever I paste anything in RStudio. There are pros and cons to this approach.

Pros: You don't have to think about it. The code will only run if the active window is RStudio.

Cons: The code is called every time you paste something in R. Each time it attempts to find backslashes and replace them with forward slashes.

GroupAdd, R, RStudio

;replaces backslashes with forward slashes in a file name that is stored on the clipboard
#IfWinActive ahk_group R
   ^v::
      StringReplace,clipboard,clipboard,\,/,All
      send %clipboard%
   return
#IfWinActive

Answer 2

I wrote a autohotkey script that is triggered by typing "rfil " - without the inverted commas.

:O:rfil:: ;replaces backslashes with forward slashes in a file name that is stored on the clipboard
StringReplace,clipboard,clipboard,\,/,All
send %clipboard%
return

If anyone can tell me a quicker way than using the send command I would appreciate it. I have an autohotkey script running all the time on all my computers so I did not have to download new software in order to run this script. I simply added it to my default script file.

I will be happy to explain what I did if you want me to.

Answer 3

Not exactly the answer you're looking for but R has its own shell scripting functions which I often use:

list.files(,full=TRUE) [returns full path with appropriate separators]

file.path() [joins with OS-specific separator]

and so on...

Answer 4

ClipPath adds right-click menu options to choose which kind of slash you want to paste.

Via Getting Genetics Done, which looks like it could be a useful resource for R users in general.

Answer 5

This is AutoIt code which does the same thing (replaces \ with /).

Local $text1 = ClipGet()
$text2=StringReplace($text1,"\","/")
ClipPut($text2)

Answer 6

You could create a wrapper function around all path names:

> replace.slash <- function(path.name) gsub("\\\\","/",path.name)
> path.name <- "c:\\tmp\\"
> replace.slash(path.name)
[1] "c:/tmp/"

[Edit]: Thanks Hadley. I corrected the error there.

Incidentally, I found this very useful discussion on this subject.