Why do I get \ in output when using deparse in R?

Question

Why and how do I get rid of the \ in deparse:

variable <- "Only output text"
deparse(variable)

Output: [1] "\"Only output text\""

I would just like to get "Only text" as output.

For example this does not work:

 result_description <- paste("result =", cat(deparse(variable)))
result_description

Answer 1

The \ is simply telling you that the double quote following it is part of the string itself. So it is not a \ that is the undesired character in your text, it is the double quotes. You can remove these with a gsub command very easily:

variable <- "Only output text"
gsub("\"", "", deparse(variable))
#> [1] "Only output text"

However, it's really not clear why you would do this. The line gsub("\"", "", deparse(variable)) is identical to variable :

gsub("\"", "", deparse(variable)) == variable
#> [1] TRUE