From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Tue Oct 30 08:10:16 2007
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk)
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 08:10:16 +0100 (CET)
Subject: [Rd] R can't source() long lines (PR#10383)
Message-ID: <20071030071016.54991282EFF1@mail.pubhealth.ku.dk>

This is as documented in ?source, and so is not a bug.

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007, martin.kober at gmail.com wrote:

> Full_Name: Martin Kober
> Version: 2.6.0
> OS: Vista & Linux
> Submission from: (NULL) (137.208.185.169)
>
>
> Hi!
>
> I just stumbled upon a problem with file source()ing:
>
> R will fail to source a file if it contains lines longer than about 8192 bytes
> ("input buffer overflow").
>
> While it's save to say that human-written code won't contain lines that long,
> dump()ed data structures may reasonably contain strings longer than that (as in
> my case).
>
> What's more, R will happily help you to create such files:
>
> x = paste(rep("12345678", 1024), collapse="")
> dump("x")
> source("dumpdata.R") ## this fails (on Linux & Vista)
>
> I'm now using save/load, which is probably better in that case anyway. 
> Still, I would be nice if source() worked or at least dump() would break 
> lines to avoid this issue.

It would be even nicer if users read the documentation rather than 
expected the developers to do so for them.

> Best regards,
> Martin Kober
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

-- 
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] R can't source() long lines (PR#10383)
ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk