[Rd] R on Windows crashes when using certain characters in strings in data frames (PR#14125)

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 10/12/2009 4:20 AM, karl at huftis.org wrote:
> Full_Name: Karl Ove Hufthammer
> Version: 2.10.0
> OS: Windows XP
> Submission from: (NULL) (93.124.134.66)
> 
> 
> I have found a rather strange bug in R 2.10.0 on Windows, where the choice of
> characters used in a string make R crash (i.e., Windows shows a dialogue saying
> that the application has a problem, and must be closed).

This was related to encoding changes.  It likely appeared 
Windows-specific because Windows uses a different default encoding than 
most Linux systems.  I believe it is fixed now in R-devel, and it will 
soon make it into 2.10.1-patched, but it came too late to make it into 
today's release.

I believe PR#14114 was the same issue and is also fixed, but I did less 
testing of it.  I'd appreciate it if those who saw either bug in real 
code test the patches.  They should be in today's tarball of R-devel, 
and did make it into the Windows binary build of R-devel this morning.

Duncan

> 
> I can reproduce the bug on two separate systems running Windows XP, and with
> both R 2.10.0 and the latest R.2.10.1 RC.
> 
> The following commands trigger the crash for me:
> 
> n=1e5
> k=10
> x=sample(k,n,replace=TRUE)
> y=sample(k,n,replace=TRUE)
> xy=paste(x,y,sep=" × ")
> z=sample(n)
> d=data.frame(xy,z)
> 
> The last step takes very long time, and R crashes before it's finished. Note
> that if I reduce n, the problem disappears. Also, if I change the × (a
> multiplication symbol) to a x (a letter), the problem also disappears (and the
> last command takes almost no time to run).
> 
> I originally discovered this (or a related?) bug while using 'unique' on a data
> frame similar to the 'd' data frame defined above, where R would often, but not
> always, crash. 
> 
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.10.0 (2009-10-26) 
> i386-pc-mingw32 
> 
> locale:
> [1] LC_COLLATE=Norwegian-Nynorsk_Norway.1252 
> [2] LC_CTYPE=Norwegian-Nynorsk_Norway.1252   
> [3] LC_MONETARY=Norwegian-Nynorsk_Norway.1252
> [4] LC_NUMERIC=C                             
> [5] LC_TIME=Norwegian-Nynorsk_Norway.1252    
> 
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
> 
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