path-separator

Just when I'd thought I'd seen it all with Windows path issues, I've now encountered a case that only fails when '/' (forward-slash) is used as the path separator is used: C:\temp\tcbugs>mkdir "dir1 with spaces" C:\temp\tcbugs>echo hi > "dir1 with spaces"\foo.txt C:\temp\tcbugs>type "dir1 with spaces\foo.txt" hi C:\temp\tcbugs>type "dir1 with spaces/foo.txt" The system cannot find the file specified. What is particularly interesting about this is that it appears to be specific to the cmd.exe shell and doesn't occur in PowerShell (nor presumably in the win32 API): PS C:\temp\tcbugs> type 'dir1

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

In the File class there are two strings, separator and pathSeparator . What's the difference? When should I use one over the other? user489041 If you mean File.separator and File.pathSeparator then: File.pathSeparator is used to separate individual file paths in a list of file paths. Consider on windows, the PATH environment variable. You use a ; to separate the file paths so on Windows File.pathSeparator would be ; . File.separator is either / or \ that is used to split up the path to a specific file. For example on Windows it is \ or C:\Documents\Test Karthik Ramachandran You use separator