Dear list members, sorry for my incompleteness!
My problem is the following: (R 2.3.1 on Mac OS X 10.4.7 RAM 1GByte using Mac GUI) I have a function like this: foo1 <- function() { out <- NULL for(i in 1:10010) out <- paste(out, i, ". line\n", sep="") return(out) } a <- foo1() Now I want to display 'a' on the screen: cat(a) This doesn't work. 'a' is displayed only until '830. line' print(a) The same, 'a' is displayed only until '\n754. line\n755'. cat(a, file='test.txt') # OK works fine. That means, internally 'a' is fine. Then I tried this way: foo2 <- function() { out <- NULL for(i in 1:10010) out <- c(out, paste(i, ". line", sep="")) return(out) } a <- foo2() With cat(a,sep="\n") I see the complete content of 'a'. paste(a, collapse = "\n") I only see 'a' until '\n754. line\n755'. cat(paste(a, collapse ="\n")) I only see 'a' until '830. line'. cat(paste(a, collapse ="\n"),file='test.txt') This is OK. My question now is whether there is an option to specifiy the maximum size of a string which is displayed on the screen (running R in a GUI)? Or is this fixed? I read the help page about '.Options' and I found a variable 'max.print' with the comment that is not yet used in basic R. I don't know whether this variable is responsible for that. I increased 'max.print' but nothing changed. ########## If I try this code on a Windows XP machine with 756 MByte RAM R-GUI says after executing foo1 <- function() { out <- NULL for(i in 1:10010) out <- paste(out, i, ". line\n", sep="") return(out) } a <- foo1() cat(a) ... 7548. lineWarning message: printing of extremely long output is truncated At least Windows writes a warning message. ########### If I start a R session without the R-GUI via Mac Terminal typing 'R' a<-foo1() cat(a) everything works perfectly!!! I know the issue of outputting long strings and the way to display long strings via foo2() would be ok for me, but I spent some time to figure out why my function foo1() didn't work. R, running in GUI on Mac, don't give you a warning. Now I know that if I print a long string at the Mac-GUI-console the missing final quote character is an indicator for a truncated output on a Mac. Maybe it would be nice to output a warning(?) Cheers, Hans ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.