String continuation across multiple lines, no newline characters

Question

Am using the RODBC library to bring data into R. I have a long query that I want to pass a variable to, much like this SO user.

Problem is that R interprets the whitespace/carriage returns in my query as a newline '\n'.

The accepted solution for this question suggests to simply break up the text into chunks and then paste() together - which works, but ideally I'd like to keep the whitespace intact - makes it easier to test/verify the behavior of the query over in the database before pasting into R.

In other languages I'm familiar with there's a simple line continuation character - indeed, several of the comments on the accepted answer are looking for an approach similar to python's \.

I found an aside to a workaround using strwrap deep in the bowels of an R discussion lists, so in the interest of making the internet better I will post it here. However, if someone can point the direction toward a more elegant/straightforward solution, I will happily accept your answer.

Answer 1

I don't know if you will find this helpful or not, but I have eventually gravitated towards keeping my SQL separate from my R scripts. Keeping the query in my R script, except for very very short ones, I find gets unreadable very quickly.

These days, I tend to keep queries that are more than a single line in their own separate .sql file. Then I can keep them nice and formatted and readable in a nice text editor, and read them into R as needed via something like this:

read_sql <- function(path){
    stopifnot(file.exists(path))
    sql <- readChar(path,nchar = file.info(path)$size)
    sql
}

For binding parameters into the queries, I just keep a %s where the parameter will go in the .sql file, and then add in the parameters in R using sprintf.

I've been much happier this way, as I was finding that cluttering up my R scripts with really long paste statements and multi-line character objects was making my code really hard to read.