Create Character String with Quotes in R (2 Examples)

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to display a text with quotes in R programming.

The tutorial will consist of two examples for the displaying of a text with quotes. More precisely, the tutorial contains these contents:

Let’s dive into it…

Example 1: Display Text with Double Quotation Marks

This example illustrates how to show double quotes in a character string.

For this task, we have to create the character string using single quotes:

x_double <- 'This is "my ""text with double ""quotes"'  # Create character string
x_double                                                # Print character string
# [1] "This is \"my \"\"text with double \"\"quotes\""

As you can see based on the previous output of the RStudio console, we have created a new character string object containing multiple double quotes.

In the output above, you can also see that the quotes are displayed with a slash in front. We can change that using the cat function:

cat(x_double)                                           # Apply cat function to string
# This is "my ""text with double ""quotes"

We have removed the single quotes and the slashes from the output above.

Example 2: Display Text with Single Quotation Marks

Similar to Example 1, we can also display single quotes in a character string.

This can be achieved by using double quotes to construct our character string:

x_single <- "This is 'my ''text with single ''quotes'"  # Create character string
x_single                                                # Print character string
# [1] "This is 'my ''text with single ''quotes'"

As in Example 1, we can use the cat function to avoid the single quotes in the RStudio console output:

cat(x_single)                                           # Apply cat function to string
# This is 'my ''text with single ''quotes'

Video, Further Resources & Summary

In case you need more explanations on the R programming syntax of this tutorial, you might want to have a look at the following video that I have published on my YouTube channel. I explain the R programming code of this article in the video:

Furthermore, you may read the other tutorials on https://www.statisticsglobe.com/:

• Error: ‘R’ is an unrecognized escape in character string starting “”C:R”
• Escape Backslash in Character String
• Remove All White Space from Character String
• parse, deparse & expression Functions in R
• Don’t Display Quotes when Printing Character String to R Console
• All R Programming Tutorials

Summary: In this article you have learned how to show quotes in a character string in the R programming language. Please let me know in the comments section, if you have any additional questions on how to print text data properly.