title: Raw text strings for file paths in R
body: <p>Is it possible to use a prefix when specifying a filepath string in R to ignore escape characters?</p>
  
  <p>For example if I want to read in the file <code>example.csv</code> when using windows, I need to manually change <code>\</code> to <code>/</code> or <code>\\</code>. For example,</p>
  
  <pre><code>'E:\DATA\example.csv'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>becomes</p>
  
  <pre><code>'E:/DATA/example.csv'
  
  data &lt;- read.csv('E:/DATA/example.csv')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In <code>python</code> I can prefix my string using <code>r</code> to avoid doing this (e.g. <code>r'E:\DATA\example.csv'</code>). Is there a similar command in <code>R</code>, or an approach that I can use to avoid having this problem. (I move between windows, mac and linux - this is just a problem on the windows OS obviously).</p>