String continuation across multiple lines, no newline characters

I don't know if you will find this helpful or not, but I have eventually gravitated towards keeping my SQL separate from my R scripts. Keeping the query in my R script, except for very very short ones, I find gets unreadable very quickly.

These days, I tend to keep queries that are more than a single line in their own separate .sql file. Then I can keep them nice and formatted and readable in a nice text editor, and read them into R as needed via something like this:

read_sql <- function(path){
    stopifnot(file.exists(path))
    sql <- readChar(path,nchar = file.info(path)$size)
    sql
}

For binding parameters into the queries, I just keep a %s where the parameter will go in the .sql file, and then add in the parameters in R using sprintf.

I've been much happier this way, as I was finding that cluttering up my R scripts with really long paste statements and multi-line character objects was making my code really hard to read.

query <- gsub(pattern='\\s',replacement="",x=query)

R's strwrap will destroy whitespace, including newline characters, per the documentation.

Essentially, you can get the desired behavior by initially letting R introduce line breaks/newline \ns, and then immediately stripping them out.

#make query using PASTE
query_1 <- paste("SELECT map.ps_studentid 
      ,students.first_name || ' ' || students.last_name AS full_name
      ,map.testritscore
      ,map.termname
      ,map.measurementscale
FROM map$comprehensive_with_growth map
JOIN students 
  ON map.ps_studentid = students.id
WHERE map.termname = '",map_term,"'", sep='')

#remove newline characters introduced above.  
#width is an arbitrary big number-
#it just needs to be longer than your string.
query_1 <- strwrap(query_1, width=10000, simplify=TRUE)

#execute the query 
map_njask <- sqlQuery(XE, query_1)