[kepler-dev] [Bug 4270] New: - RExpression exports special characters in strings as the 2 character escaped sequence

[bugzilla-daemon at ecoinformatics.org]

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4270

           Summary: RExpression exports special characters in strings as the
                    2 character escaped sequence
           Product: Kepler
           Version: 1.x dev
          Platform: Other
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: minor
          Priority: P2
         Component: actors
        AssignedTo: berkley at nceas.ucsb.edu
        ReportedBy: soong at nceas.ucsb.edu
         QAContact: kepler-dev at kepler-project.org


Let's say I want to export the string "alpha", including the double quotes, on
the port a from an RExpression actor.  The R code is: 
a <- "\"alpha\""
nchar(a) (string length) indicates 7 characters as expected.
cat(a, "\n", sep = "") displays as expected.
Exporting strings is filtered through dput, which escapes special characters,
so the output string contains the 2 character escape sequence \".  If I pass
the output port to an Expression actor with an input port named input and
evaluate the expression input.length, I get 9.  Similar problems occur for \n
and \t and presumably other characters I'm not thinking of at the moment.