[Rd] Unexpected behavior with \r in Rgui 2.12.0

[Henrik Bengtsson]

On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Henrik Bengtsson <hb at biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:
> FYI, this topic was discussed in R-help thread 'cat(), Rgui, and
> support for carriage return \r...' on March 17-29, 2006:
>
>  https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2006-March/101863.html
>
> Some modifications to Rgui's behavior was brought up and (I think)
> implemented at the time.
>
> As far as I remember, after that discussion ASCII carriage return did
> indeed *move* the point/cursor to the beginning of the current line. I
> remember trying it at the time, but I admit I haven't verified it in
> several years now.

[scrap]
> However, I believe that that was before Unicode
> character support was introduced, and my best guess is that support
> for the latter may have changed the expected behavior of carriage
> return.
[/scrap]

Remove that last guess of mine; know I re-read Ripley's message and
see that the displaying of odd characters was due to a bug, which was
just fixed.  It will take a couple of days before binaries of that
patched version are available on CRAN.

/Henrik

>
> My $.02 on the history
>
> /Henrik
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 7:49 AM, Russell Pierce <rpier001 at ucr.edu> wrote:
>> Prof. Ripley & Joris,
>>
>> I concur with Joris, the behavior persists in R version 2.12.0 Patched
>> (2010-11-24 r53655) and  under Windows XP.  The current development build
>> for Windows did not have an RGui at the time I wrote this.
>>
>> I did not realize that the functionality of "\r" to return to
>> the beginning of the line in Windows was undocumented/unsupported.  ?Quotes
>> lists \r as carriage return without any warning that it is unsupported in
>> RGui, perhaps a notice should be put in?
>>
>> Since "\r" is not supported, I would like to express a desire that it at
>> least do something predictable.  Certainly, it seems doubtful that
>> these "strange characters" (with the copying characteristics described) is
>> what a user expects.  If "\r" is not usable under RGui perhaps it would be
>> better to ignore it entirely than to parse it and return the odd output that
>> I am seeing?
>>
>> In the RGui for Windows prior to this version "\r" returned to
>> the beginning of the line without deleting the already written content.
>>  Thus cat(70,"\r") and cat("\r",70) only differed in terms of where the
>> cursor was left.
>>
>> I started using "\r" because I had seen it in the code for txtProgressBar.
>>  The help for txtProgressBar does note that it "uses \r to return to the
>> left margin – the interpretation of carriage return is up to the terminal or
>> console in which *R* is running". For Jorris' reference, in a windows
>> environment there are several methods to produce keep track of progress:
>> tcltk::tkProgressBar, utils::txtProgressBar , and utils::winProgressBar.
>>  None of them are as "user friendly" as cat and "\r" because you have to
>> create the progress bar, increment it, then destroy it.  If you want to
>> output debugging information as well as increment a counter you need to
>> tweak the title attribute as you go.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Russell S. Pierce
>>
>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
>>
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>>
>