What are escape characters in R?

Overview

An escape character in R is used whenever you are trying to add an illegal character or a character that would otherwise be difficult to add to a string.

Some of the escape characters in R are:

Example

Imagine you want to insert a double quote inside of a string that is already surrounded by double quotes:

Code 1

The code below has an error. It demonstrates what happens when escape characters are not used.

Output

Error: unexpected symbol in "mystring <- "Hello pals, welcome on board to the "Captain"

This is the reason why we use the escape characters. Therefore, to solve this problem of having a double quotation mark inside a string enclosed in a double quotation mark, we use the \"

Code 2

It is worth noting that the cat() function helps use print the mystring variable without the backslash, unlike auto-printing the mystring variable using \"