[Rd] Warning on backslash sequences (was sprintf behavior)

[Bill Dunlap]

> > Splus's parser emits a warning when it sees a backslash
> > outside of the recognized backslash sequence.  E.g.,
> >
> >  > nchar("\Backslashed?")
> >  [1] 12
> >  Warning messages:
> >    The initial backslash is ignored in \B -- not a recognized escape sequence.
> >          Use \\ to make a backslash
> >
> > You might want to add that warning to R's parser.  I've
> > seen the error in several R packages.  E.g.,
> >
> >  bayesmix/R/JAGScontrol.R:  text[4] <- "-inits.R\"\n\initialize\n"
> >  SciViews/svDialogs/R/fixedDlg.wxPython.R:        if (length(grep("[\.]", basename(res))) == 0)
> >
> > The warning is mostly emitted when the error is benign, but it
> > might help get people to think about what they are typing.
>
> I am not at all sure about this.  R's documentation says
>  ...
>         '\n'          newline
>         '\r'          carriage return
>         '\t'          tab
>         '\b'          backspace
>         '\a'          alert (bell)
>         '\f'          form feed
>         '\v'          vertical tab
>         '\\'          backslash '\'
>         '\nnn'        character with given octal code (1, 2 or 3 digits)
>         '\xnn'        character with given hex code (1 or 2 hex digits)
>         '\unnnn'      Unicode character with given code (1-4 hex digits)
>         '\Unnnnnnnn'  Unicode character with given code (1-8 hex digits)
>
> so it is not an error in R.  People tend not to like being warned about
> legitimate usage (and one can see this sort of thing being intentional in
> machine-generated scripts: for example to escape spaces in file paths
> and to escape line feeds).

We had that same sort of argument here, but enough people were
asking our support people about the matter that we put in
the warning.  As I said, the warning is odd in that it warns
about legitimate usage in the hopes that people will know to
use "\\" for a backslash when they need to.

> What exactly does Splus's parser allow as intentional?

Splus currently "supports" (does not warn about)
    \nnn  (1-3 octal digits)
    \n, \t, \b, \r, \', \", and \`
We do not support the \f, \v, \xnn, \unnnn, or \Unnnnnnnn.
We should add the \f, \v, \a, and \xnn (as well as 0xnn for integers),
but we overlooked those.  (Adding new backslash sequences is relatively
safe: we have been warning about unrecognized \f's for for years so
we shouldn't expect to find too many folks using \f where they intended
either \\f or f.)

We don't support unicode so we won't do anything with the \unnnn or
\Unnnnnnnn.  That is something Splus does need to warn about to aid in
porting stuff from R.

Neither of the examples I showed cause any ill effect,
but using the grep pattern of '[\.]' shows that he
doesn't know that dots are taken literally inside of
square brackets in regular expressions and the use of
"\." outside of brackets would give incorrect results.

> >  bayesmix/R/JAGScontrol.R:  text[4] <- "-inits.R\"\n\initialize\n"
> >  SciViews/svDialogs/R/fixedDlg.wxPython.R:        if (length(grep("[\.]", basename(res))) == 0)

In SciViews I also see
   command <- sub("view\.[A-Za-z0-9\._]+[(]", "view(", command)
which is almost certainly wrong and I suspect that its
   cat(";for Options\AutoIndent: 0=Off, 1=follow language scoping and 2=copy from previous line\n",
wants an extra \ before AutoIndent.

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Bill Dunlap
Insightful Corporation
bill at insightful dot com
360-428-8146

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