How to code and print a character string formatted with line breaks?

mmyoung77 picture mmyoung77 · Oct 18, 2017 · Viewed 16.5k times · Source

If I have a string that contains line breaks, how can I code it in R without manually adding \n between lines and then print it with the line breaks? There should be multiple lines of output; each line of the original string should print as a separate line.

This is an example of how to do the task in Python:

string = """
  Because I could
  Not stop for Death
  He gladly stopped for me
  """

Example use case: I have a long SQL code with a bunch of line breaks and sub-commands. I want to enter the code as a single string to be evaluated later, but cleaning it up by hand would be difficult.

Answer

Gregor Thomas picture Gregor Thomas · Oct 18, 2017

Nothing special is needed. Just a quote mark at the beginning and end.

In R:

x = "Because I could
Not stop for Death
He gladly stopped for me"
x
# [1] "Because I could\nNot stop for Death\nHe gladly stopped for me"

cat(x)
# Because I could
# Not stop for Death
# He gladly stopped for me

In Python:

>>> string = """
...     Because I could
...     Not stop for Death
...     He gladly stopped for me
... """
>>> string
'\n\tBecause I could\n\tNot stop for Death\n\tHe gladly stopped for me\n'