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

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 3/29/2006 2:49 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> 
>> On 3/28/2006 11:00 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>>> Rgui now supports \r in the same way as rterm.
>> I notice that there's a slight change to the colour scheme:  now the prompt 
>> ">" is in foreground colour, rather than user colour.  This might make sense 
>> (it's printed by the system, after all), but it looks a little strange at 
>> first.
> 
> Yes, it was intentional.  The problem is that you can now do
> 
>> cat("abcde\rf")
> 
> and then the next line will be
> 
> f> de
> 
> with the cursor on the 'd'.  There is no longer a left-right divide 
> between system output and user input, as you can have output to the right 
> of user input.  The previous behaviour was to mark as system output all 
> the columns up to the 'e' here, so when you started entering new input it 
> looked very odd indeed, changing colour in mid-word.
> 
> I can change to making the prompt be explicitly regarded as user input, 
> which would be backwards compatible and less odd in cases like this.

I'd lean towards backwards compatibility here, but don't have a strong 
preference.  It's less than perfect that the de is shown as user input, 
but fixing that would require a pretty large change to the console code.

Duncan Murdoch
> 
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>>
>>> On Sun, 19 Mar 2006, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 3/18/2006 2:39 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>>>>> On 3/17/2006 9:44 AM, Jeffrey Racine wrote:
>>>>>> 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.
>>>>> I've just been looking at the source code for this.  I think it will be
>>>>> relatively easy to make \r in Rgui do a destructive CR (i.e. it will
>>>>> return to the start of the line, but clear any existing characters).
>>>>> I'll play around a bit and then do that for R-devel.
>>>> Oops, this was a bad idea.  I did commit the change for a while, but
>>>> have reverted it now.
>>>>
>>>> It seems that the help system displays help pages by writing CR LF at
>>>> the end of each line; the CR is \r, and my change above caused it to
>>>> wipe out the line it had just written.  The help pages ended up
>>>> completely blank.
>>>>
>>>> I may look into supporting \r as a non-destructive CR, but that's
>>>> harder, because it means low-level changes to the console display.
>>>> Right now it only writes to the end of the text buffer; this would mean
>>>> it would sometimes write to a spot before the end.  I don't think it
>>>> would be impossible to do, but it will take more time than I have right 
>>>> now.
>>>>
>>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>>
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>>
>