Replacing ' by \'

Question

How to convert ' in a string to \' in R?

Example: from Bob's to Bob\'s

Answer 1

> gsub("'", "\\\\'", "foo's bar's")
[1] "foo\\'s bar\\'s"

The results looks like the backslashes are double-escaped, but if you check with nchars() you'll see that it's actually just single backslashes.

Answer 2

I finally figured it out:

gsub("\'", "\\\'", "Bob's")

What confused me was that the backslash isn't displayed.

Answer 3

You have to escape the backslash.

> gsub("'","\\\\'","Bob's")  # R prints with the escape embedded
[1] "Bob\\'s"
> cat(gsub("'","\\\\'","Bob's"),"\n")  # But it's just a single backslash
Bob\'s