[Rd] cat cannot write more than 10000 characters? [R 2.8.1]

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 4 Jan 2009, Daniel Sabanés Bové wrote:

> Hi,
>
> during the examination of a Sweave hang-up inside an odfWeave call (OOo
> XMLs have looong lines) I have discovered that my cat function cannot
> write more than 10000 characters to a text file. Otherwise, the internal

You mean on a single line?

> C code causes a hang-up, which can only be stopped with a quit signal
> that terminates the R session. Is this behavior normal?

No, works for me on Mac OS X and x86_64 Fedora 8 (as does 10x larger).
Can you run this under a debugger and find where it is going wrong for 
you?

> Code to reproduce this:
>
> testChunk <- paste(rep("a", 10000 + 1), ## delete "+ 1" to be successful
>                   collapse="")
> output <- tempfile()
> cat(testChunk, sep = "\n", file = output, append = TRUE)

We have writeLines() for that and it is more efficient, especially if you 
keep a connection open.

> My sessionInfo:
>
> R version 2.8.1 (2008-12-22)
> i686-pc-linux-gnu (actually the latest openSuse 11.1)
> locale:
> LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8;LC_COLLATE=de_DE.UTF-8;LC_MONETARY=C;LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.UTF-8;LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Daniel

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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