[Rd] gsub with perl=TRUE results in 'this version of PCRE is not compiled with Unicode property support' in R-devel

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Why are you reporting that your PCRE library does not have something 
which the R-admin manual says it should preferably have?  To wit, 
footnote 37 says

'and not PCRE2, which started at version 10.0. PCRE must be built with 
UTF-8 support (not the default) and support for Unicode properties is 
assumed by some R packages. Neither are tested by configure. JIT support 
is desirable.'

That certainly does not fail on my Linux, Windows and OS X builds of 
R-devel.  (Issues about pre-built binaries, if that is what you used, 
should be reported to their maintainers, not here.)

And the help does say in ?regex

      In UTF-8 mode, some Unicode properties may be supported via
      ‘\p{xx}’ and ‘\P{xx}’ which match characters with and without
      property ‘xx’ respectively.

Note the 'may'.




On 07/01/2015 23:25, Dan Tenenbaum wrote:
> The following code:
>
> res <- gsub("(*UCP)\\b(i)\\b",
>      "", "nhgrimelanomaclass", perl = TRUE)
>
> results in:
>
> Error in gsub(sprintf("(*UCP)\\b(%s)\\b", "i"), "", "nhgrimelanomaclass",  :
>    invalid regular expression '(*UCP)\b(i)\b'
> In addition: Warning message:
> In gsub(sprintf("(*UCP)\\b(%s)\\b", "i"), "", "nhgrimelanomaclass",  :
>    PCRE pattern compilation error
> 	'this version of PCRE is not compiled with Unicode property support'
> 	at '(*UCP)\b(i)\b'
>
> on
>
> R Under development (unstable) (2015-01-01 r67290)
> Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
> Running under: OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks)
>
> locale:
> [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>
> And also on the same version of R-devel on Snow Leopard, Windows, and Linux. But it does not produce an error on
>
> R version 3.1.2 (2014-10-31)
> Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
>
> locale:
> [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>
> Dan
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK