R: read in a line from user input with newline character

Question

I am trying to use readline() for reading in a user input. My input has a newline character, which gets escaped, unfortunately.

> readline(prompt = "Tell me: ")
Tell me: first\nsecond
[1] "first\\nsecond"

How do I get

[1] "first\nsecond"

Answer 1

Do you simply want to remove the extra \? If so:

x
#> [1] "first\\nsecond"

gsub("\\n", "\n", x, fixed = TRUE)
#> [1] "first\nsecond"

^{Created on 2022-01-04 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}