Are double "" and single '' quotes (always) interchangeable in R?

r quotes double-quotes single-quotes
Stephen Henderson picture Stephen Henderson · Dec 13, 2013 · Viewed 12.6k times · Source

This is perhaps rather a minor question...

but just a moment ago I was looking through some code I had written and noticed that I tend to just use ="something" and ='something_else' completely interchangeably, often in the same function.

So my question is: Is there R code in which using one or other (single or double quotes) has different behaviour? Or are they totally synonymous?

Answer

Waldir Leoncio picture Waldir Leoncio · Dec 13, 2013

According to http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/base/html/Quotes.html, "[s]ingle and double quotes delimit character constants. They can be used interchangeably but double quotes are preferred (and character constants are printed using double quotes), so single quotes are normally only used to delimit character constants containing double quotes."

Related questions

Remove quotes from a character vector in R

Suppose you have a character vector: char <- c("one", "two", "three") When you make reference to an index value, you get the following: > char[1] [1] "one" How can you strip off the quote marks from the return value …

Read More
How to read quoted text containing escaped quotes

Consider the following comma separated file. For simplicity let it contain one line: 'I am quoted','so, can use comma inside - it is not separator here','but can\'t use escaped quote :=(' If you try to read it …

Read More
Remove rows with all or some NAs (missing values) in data.frame

I'd like to remove the lines in this data frame that: a) contain NAs across all columns. Below is my example data frame. gene hsap mmul mmus rnor cfam 1 ENSG00000208234 0 NA NA NA NA 2 ENSG00000199674 0 2 2 2 2 3 ENSG00000221622 0 NA NA NA NA 4 …

Read More