[Rd] The regular expressions in compareVersion()

[Yihui Xie]

You are right that this is unlikely to cause problems, because users
are unlikely to put backslashes in version numbers. Henrik has pointed
out the problem. It is not about "making the source code a little
cleaner", but "making it correct". Either someone in R core corrects
the wrong regular expressions in a few seconds (unless you think \ can
be a legal character in a version number), or I just give up the
report. It seems the latter is easier. It is not worth additional
Q&A's back and forth.

Regarding the regular expression problem for \Sexpr{} in Sweave,
please see here for a record:
http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Sweave-printing-an-underscore-in-the-output-from-an-R-command-td4675177.html
As I said, it is a similar problem: someone tried to escape a
character that did not need to be escaped in [].

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Web: http://yihui.name


On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 6:20 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24/04/2014, 5:26 PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 1:42 PM, Duncan Murdoch
>> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 24/04/2014, 1:11 PM, Yihui Xie wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I guess the backslash should not be used as the separator for
>>>> strsplit() in compareVersion(), because the period in [.] is no longer
>>>> a metacharacter (no need to "escape" it using a backslash):
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/trunk/src/library/utils/R/packages.R#L866-L867
>>>>
>>>>> compareVersion
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> function (a, b)
>>>> {
>>>> ....
>>>>       a <- as.integer(strsplit(a, "[\\.-]")[[1L]])
>>>>       b <- as.integer(strsplit(b, "[\\.-]")[[1L]])
>>>> ....
>>>> <environment: namespace:utils>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Could you post an example where this causes trouble, or are you just
>>> suggesting this as a way to make the source a little cleaner?
>>
>>
>> Maybe it's already clear, but [\\.] is the set for the two symbols '\'
>> and '.', not '.' alone.  For example, I would expect an error below:
>>
>>> compareVersion("3.14-59.26", "3.14-59\\26")
>>
>> [1] 0
>>
>
> How does that cause problems?
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>
>> /Henrik
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> A similar regular expression problem also exists in the Sweave syntax
>>>> (for \Sexpr{}), and I have reported it once. It was fixed but the fix
>>>> was immediately reverted for some reason:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/52b0a46e15136a7f9e4777e9960fdda6d84880c0
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> A link to your report would be more useful, if it included an example
>>> where
>>> the bad regexp causes trouble.
>>>
>>> Duncan Murdoch