[R] cat(), Rgui, and support for carriage return \r...

[Jeffrey Racine]

Hi, and thanks in advance for your time.

Background - I am working on a package and wish to have a routine's
progress reported. The routine can take some time, and I would like to
inform the user about the routine's progress. I have scoured the
archives but to no avail, so would like to solicit input from this list.

I am successfully using

cat("\rBootstrap replication ", i, " of ", boot.num,)
flush.console() # To flush stdout on windows systems

which works as expected on *NIX systems and using Rterm under windows.
However, under Rgui the carriage return \r is ignored, and I certainly
don't want to use the newline escape sequence \n. Under Rgui it appears
as

Bootstrap replication 1 of 399Bootstrap replication 2 of 399Bootstrap...

but I want it to function properly if at all possible.

My question is simply whether there is a portable way to implement this
so that it works regardless of the R platform the user may be working
on?

Many thanks for any/all suggestions.

-- Jeff

-- 
Professor J. S. Racine         Phone:  (905) 525 9140 x 23825
Department of Economics        FAX:    (905) 521-8232
McMaster University            e-mail: racinej at mcmaster.ca
1280 Main St. W.,Hamilton,     URL:
http://www.economics.mcmaster.ca/racine/
Ontario, Canada. L8S 4M4

`The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to