[Rd] NEWS item for bugfix in normalizePath and file.exists?

[Toby Hocking]

Hi all, Today I noticed bug(s?) in R-4.0.5, which seem to be fixed in
R-devel already. I checked on
https://developer.r-project.org/blosxom.cgi/R-devel/NEWS and there is no
mention of these changes, so I'm wondering if they are intentional? If so,
could someone please add a mention of the bugfix in the NEWS?

The problem involves file.exists, on windows, when a long/strange input
file name Encoding is unknown, in C locale. I expected that FALSE should be
returned (and it is on R-devel), but I got an error in R-4.0.5. Code to
reproduce is:

x <- "\360\237\247\222\n| \360\237\247\222\360\237\217\273\n|
\360\237\247\222\360\237\217\274\n| \360\237\247\222\360\237\217\275\n|
\360\237\247\222\360\237\217\276\n| \360\237\247\222\360\237\217\277\n"
Encoding(x) <- "unknown"
Sys.setlocale(locale="C")
sessionInfo()
file.exists(x)

Output I got from R-4.0.5 was

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.0.5 (2021-03-31)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19042)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] C
system code page: 1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.0.5
> file.exists(x)
Error in file.exists(x) : file name conversion problem -- name too long?
Execution halted

Output I got from R-devel was

> sessionInfo()
R Under development (unstable) (2021-04-26 r80229)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19042)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.2.0
> file.exists(x)
[1] FALSE

I also observed similar results when using normalizePath instead of
file.exists (error in R-4.0.5, no error in R-devel).

> normalizePath(x) #R-4.0.5
Error in path.expand(path) : unable to translate 'p'
| p'p;
| p'p<
| p'p=
| p'p>
| p'p<bf>
' to UTF-8
Calls: normalizePath -> path.expand
Execution halted

> normalizePath(x) #R-devel
[1] "C:\\Users\\th798\\R\\\360\237\247\222\n|
\360\237\247\222\360\237\217\273\n| \360\237\247\222\360\237\217\274\n|
\360\237\247\222\360\237\217\275\n| \360\237\247\222\360\237\217\276\n|
\360\237\247\222\360\237\217\277\n"
Warning message:
In normalizePath(path.expand(path), winslash, mustWork) : path[1]="🧒
| 🧒🏻
| 🧒🏼
| 🧒🏽
| 🧒🏾
| 🧒🏿
": The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect

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