From cstrato at aon.at  Sun Oct 14 18:45:57 2007
From: cstrato at aon.at (cstrato)
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 18:45:57 +0200
Subject: [Rd] Inconsistent behavior of sQuote and dQuote
In-Reply-To: <1192378694.3559.45.camel@Bellerophon.localdomain>
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	<1192378694.3559.45.camel@Bellerophon.localdomain>
Message-ID: <471247C5.8040701@aon.at>

Dear Duncan and Marc

Thank you for your comments, and please allow me to express my personal 
opinion:

I have read the comments of Markus Kuhn mentioned in the help file to 
sQuote:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

Since R is a programming language, the behavior should in my opinion be 
consistent
for all platforms, and as default it should only rely on ASCII 
characters, in this
case 0x22 and 0x27, so it is possible to pass these characters to other 
programming
languages, in my case C++.

Since shQuote(string,type) has already a type option, I would suggest to 
add
options to sQuote() and dQuote(), too, with default being ASCII behavior.

However, this is only my personal opinion.

Best regards
Christian

Marc Schwartz wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-10-14 at 11:56 -0400, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>   
>> On 14/10/2007 10:44 AM, cstrato wrote:
>>     
>>> Dear all
>>>
>>> When comparing sQuote("text") and dQuote("text") on MacOS X and Linux FC4
>>> I get an inconsistent behavior (using the new release version R-2.6.0):
>>>
>>> sQuote: On Mac I get the correct result "'text'", but on FC4 the 
>>> incorrect result "`text?".
>>>       
>> Those both look correct to me (but not the same).  What do you see?
>>
>>     
>>> dQuote: On Mac I get the correct result "\"text\"", but on FC4 the 
>>> incorrect result ""text"".
>>>       
>> The second one looks wrong here (no escapes shown), but I suspect those 
>> inner quotes aren't really the same as the outer quotes, and that's why 
>> they're not escaped.
>>
>> If you don't want the fancyquotes at all, you can use 
>> options(useFancyQuotes=FALSE).  In a package, it would be polite to do 
>> this only locally, i.e. have something like
>>
>> save <- options(useFancyQuotes=FALSE)
>> on.exit(options(save))
>>
>> in functions that call sQuote or dQuote, because options() belong to the 
>> user, not to you.
>>     
>
> FWIW, on F7 I get:
>
>   
>> sQuote("text")
>>     
> [1] "?text?"
>
>   
>> dQuote("text")
>>     
> [1] "?text?"
>
>
> options(useFancyQuotes = FALSE)
>
>   
>> sQuote("text")
>>     
> [1] "'text'"
>
>   
>> dQuote("text")
>>     
> [1] "\"text\""
>
>
> The differing behavior between OS X and FC4 is perhaps due to the
> available character sets and the locales, presuming that they may not be
> the same. See the Details section of ?sQuote.
>
> I might also point out that FC4 has been EOL for some time. It would be
> prudent to consider updating to a more recent version. FC6 and F7 are
> the currently maintained releases, with F8 due to be released on
> November 8.
>
> HTH,
>
> Marc Schwartz
>
>
>
>
>



[Rd] Inconsistent behavior of sQuote and dQuote
cstrato