Why not just use some tag that R doesn't already use, say "Comment:", instead of a #? If you allow # in position one of a line to mean a comment then people may expect # to be used as a comment anywhere on a line.
(It may also mess up some dcf parsing code that I've written - it checks that lines after tagged lines are either empty, the start of a new description, or start with a space, a continuation of the previous line.) Bill Dunlap Spotfire, TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com > -----Original Message----- > From: r-devel-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-devel-boun...@r-project.org] On > Behalf > Of Hervé Pagès > Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 3:47 PM > To: Duncan Murdoch > Cc: christophe.genol...@u-paris10.fr; r-devel@r-project.org; Christophe > Genolini > Subject: Re: [Rd] Comments in the DESCRIPTION file > > > > On 12/06/2012 03:41 PM, Hervé Pagès wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Wouldn't be hard to patch read.dcf() though. > > > > FWIW here's the "comment aware" version of read.dcf() I've been using > > for years: > > > > .removeCommentLines <- function(infile=stdin(), outfile=stdout()) > > { > > if (is.character(infile)) { > > infile <- file(infile, "r") > > on.exit(close(infile)) > > } > > if (is.character(outfile)) { > > outfile <- file(outfile, "w") > > on.exit({close(infile); close(outfile)}) > > } > > while (TRUE) { > > lines <- readLines(infile, n=25000L) > > if (length(lines) == 0L) > > return() > > keep_it <- substr(lines, 1L, 1L) != "#" > > writeLines(lines[keep_it], outfile) > > } > > } > > > > read.dcf2 <- function(file, ...) > > { > > clean_file <- file.path(tempdir(), "clean.dcf") > > mmh, would certainly be better to just use tempfile() here. > > H. > > > .removeCommentLines(file, clean_file) > > on.exit(file.remove(clean_file)) > > read.dcf(clean_file, ...) > > } > > > > Cheers, > > H. > > > > On 11/07/2012 01:53 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote: > >> On 12-11-07 4:26 AM, Christophe Genolini wrote: > >>> Hi all, > >>> > >>> Is it possible to add comments in the DESCRIPTION file? > >> > >> > >> The read.dcf function is used to read the DESCRIPTION file, and it > >> doesn't support comments. (The current Debian control format > >> description does appear to support comments with leading # markers, but > >> R's read.dcf function doesn't support these.) > >> > >> You could probably get away with something like > >> > >> #: this is a comment > >> > >> since unrecognized fields are ignored, but I think this fact is > >> undocumented so I would say it's safer to assume that comments are not > >> supported. > >> > >> Duncan Murdoch > >> > >> ______________________________________________ > >> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > > > -- > Hervé Pagès > > Program in Computational Biology > Division of Public Health Sciences > Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center > 1100 Fairview Ave. N, M1-B514 > P.O. Box 19024 > Seattle, WA 98109-1024 > > E-mail: hpa...@fhcrc.org > Phone: (206) 667-5791 > Fax: (206) 667-1319 > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
