[Rd] Bug in read.table?

[Ben Bolker]

 <jgarcia <at> ija.csic.es> writes:

> 
> Thanks. Yes, quote="" solves the problem.
> 
> I would never say, however, from the documentations, that this was causing
> the duplicate records. Rather, I would have expected some kind of
> warning/error message.
> 
> And, yes, I knew that, through duplicate(), R solves gracefully this
> specific problem. Just thought this could be of interests for R devel.
> 

  A bit of a meta- point here: there may indeed be a bug here
(it's the kind of obscure "corner case" that someone may not have
tested), but it's unlikely to get noted as such and fixed unless you
can come up with a clear analysis of what is happening and how the
misinterpretation of quote characters is leading to duplication of
records. (You, or someone else -- recognizing that this may be beyond
your skill level.  It might be that 'just' very careful thought
and analysis of the behavior described in the documentation would
explain this, or one might have to dig through source code in R or C.)
Problems with unescaped/unrecognized quote characters are very
common.

 Otherwise, this will likely be dismissed as a ("doctor, it hurts
when I do this"; "well then, don't do that!") sort of situation.

  Ben Bolker