From Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch>  Thu Aug 19 10:38:41 1999
From: Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch> (Martin Maechler)
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 11:38:41 +0200
Subject: date() should not append a final "\n" ?!?
In-Reply-To: <14267.50386.581977.851244@galadriel.ci.tuwien.ac.at> (message
 from Friedrich Leisch on Thu, 19 Aug 1999 10:48:18 +0200 (CEST))
References: <199908190845.KAA24041@sophie.ethz.ch> <14267.50386.581977.851244@galadriel.ci.tuwien.ac.at>
Message-ID: <199908190938.LAA24130@sophie.ethz.ch>


>>>>> On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 10:45:35 +0200,
>>>>> Martin Maechler (MM) wrote:

    MM> Between R 0.63.2 and 0.64, the behavior of 
    MM> date()
    MM> has been changed in order to become platform independent.
    MM> It now uses POSIX calls, basically

    MM> time_t t;
    MM> time(&t);
    MM> return ctime(&t);


    MM> This currently returns (for me on Sun SPARC Solaris)

    >>> date()
    MM> [1] "Thu Aug 19 10:36:28 1999\n"

    MM> where I think the final "\n" is really UNdesired.

    FrL> Yes!

Okay,
I checked  Lewine (1991) "POSIX Programmer's Guide" :

POSIX specifies that ctime() has a final "\n" 
(before the string terminator \0)
and always length 26 (incl. terminator)

Hence, we have to drop the final "\n",
already in function R_Date() which is [in src/main/platform.c]
currently
    char *R_Date()
    {
	time_t t;
	time(&t);
	return ctime(&t);
    }

How can we drop is this done in the most elegant way?
(without having to allocate a  char[26] ?)


 
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date() should not append a final "\n" ?!?
Martin Maechler