I am not sitting in front of my Mac, so some of this is by remote login
and some from memory.
On Sat, 29 Dec 2007, Philippe Grosjean wrote:
Hello,
I have a couple of questions regarding the way R.app works:
1) R.app forces \n at the end of output:
> cat("some text")
some text
>
While on any other R console I have tested (including R in a terminal on
a Mac), it is not the case:
> cat("some text")
some text>
This is a problem for two reasons: (1) Mac users may forgot to add \n
when using cat() and it would produce weird results elsewhere, and (2)
it is sometimes useful to be able to write something before the prompt,
or to write text without \n (see progress() in svMisc package, for an
example of use)
That surely is a bug: however my memory the line is being completed when
input is required. Handling that 'properly' in a console is hard
programming work.
2) R.app does not interpret \a and \b. \a should output a sound ('bip')
and is used in alarm() function that does not work in R.app, and \b is
backspace and is supposed to erase previous character. Consequently:
> cat("abc\bd\n")
abcd
>
which is wrong, or at least, different from the behavior on all other R
consoles I have used which gives:
> cat("abc\bd\n")
abd
>
How control characters are interpreted is terminal-dependent and can often
be selected for a terminal. But it would seem sensible for R.app to
follow the usual interpretations.
3) Despite reading Mac-FAQ, I cannot figure out how to print French
messages correctly. I got something like:
> nonexistingvar
Erreur : objet "nonexistingvar" non trouv'e
>
This is the same on the terminal. Under Windows (RGui), I got:
> nonexistingvar
Erreur : objet "nonexistingvar" non trouvé
>
How can I fix this? (I am the maintainer of R French translation, and it
uses 'charset=ISO-8859-1').
Irrelevant: the C-level gettext code does all the re-encodings needed.
I don't know if this should be considered as bugs, or if I miss some
point here.
The latter works correctly if I set the locale on the command line, so
must be an issue with locales. E.g. in a terminal
blacklark% env LC_ALL=fr_FR.UTF8 R
nonexistingvar
Erreur : objet "nonexistingvar" non trouvé
My understanding is that R.app is supposed to interpret Mac OS language
preferences as locales, and it seems that this is not working correctly
for you. I would expect
Sys.setenv(LANGUAGE="fr")
to fix this up in the session: it does for me in a terminal session (which
gives UTF-8 output even in a C locale).
--
Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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
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