From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Tue Oct 14 14:59:05 2008
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:59:05 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Rd] dos-style line endings in .Rbuildignore result in files
 not being excluded
In-Reply-To: <48F494AC.40605@pooryorick.com>
References: <48F429D1.6040500@acm.org>
	<874p3fn3yf.fsf@patagonia.sebmags.homelinux.org>
	<alpine.LFD.2.00.0810141248500.27617@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>
	<48F494AC.40605@pooryorick.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0810141356480.12697@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008, Nathan Coulter wrote:

> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>
>> But to the point: how often do people get DOS-style files on a
>> Unix-alike? You have to work pretty hard to do this, and there comes a
>> point at which complicating R to workaround wrongly encoded files is not
>> worth the trouble.  Let's see if anyone else reports having done this.
>>
>
> In my experience, this is a common occurrence.  Granted, foreign line
> delimiters are less common in a configuration file like .Rbuildignore, but 
> they
> have been the culprit more than once in package problems I have encountered.
> think functionality like Python's universal newlines would be a big win for 
> R.

But R *does* have 'universal newlines' on its connections, and has for 
many years.

We are talking about a Perl script here, not R.

> One of the big draws in a programming language like Python is its claim to
> being portable, and universal newlines are a critical part of that
> functionality.  Mac-style newline delimiters are surfacing more often these
> days as well, and the best place to sort this all out would be in the 
> built-in
> file manipulation functions.
> -- 
> Nathan Coulter
> Computer Programmer
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595



[Rd] dos-style line endings in .Rbuildignore result in files not being excluded
Prof Brian Ripley