Disable globbing? Error on reading file with square brackets in file name

[vanatteveldt]

I encountered an error when reading in a (text) file with [1] in the name:

> readr::write_file("test", file="test[1].txt")
> readtext::readtext("test[1].txt")
Error in list_files(file, ignore_missing, TRUE, verbosity) : 
  File '' does not exist.

This is presumably caused by globbing, i.e. it treats [1] as a character class.

Is there a way to disable globbing? In this case, I have a list of files that I want to read, and I want to treat the file list as a list of literal file names, not globbing patterns.

Note that (1) It actually took me a while to figure out globbing was the problem, as I associate globbing with *, not with [], and the error message is also not very helpful since the globbed file pattern becomes an empty string, so I had to figure out which of my (300k) files was causing the problem; (2) how globbing works is system dependent (as per the Sys.glob documentation), which says that a glob system call is used which "probably" includes character classes (3) it is unclear to me how to escape globbing patterns, at least using text\\[1\\].txt did not work, even though Sys.glob("test\\[1\\].txt") works as expected, so apparently something happens in between.

Reproducible case and failed attempts at escaping the glob:

> readr::write_file("test", file="test[1].txt")
> readtext::readtext("text[1].txt")
Error in list_files(file, ignore_missing, TRUE, verbosity) : 
  File '' does not exist.
> readtext::readtext("text\\[1\\].txt")
Error in list_files(file, ignore_missing, TRUE, verbosity) : 
  File '' does not exist.
> readtext::readtext("text\\[1].txt")
Error in list_files(file, ignore_missing, TRUE, verbosity) : 
  File '' does not exist.
> readtext::readtext("text\\\\[1\\\\].txt")
Error in list_files(file, ignore_missing, TRUE, verbosity) : 
  File '' does not exist.
> readtext::readtext("text\[1\].txt")
Error: '\[' is an unrecognized escape in character string starting ""text\["
> Sys.glob("test[1].txt")
character(0)
> Sys.glob("test\\[1\\].txt")
[1] "test[1].txt"