[R] make check failure, internet.Rout.fail, Error in strsplit

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Feb 12, 2007, at 6:28 PM, Paul Lynch wrote:

> I'm trying to build R on RedHat EL4.  The compile went fine, but a
> make check ran into a problem and produced a file
> "internet.Rout.fail".  Judging by the last part of that file, it was
> trying to run an R routine called "httpget" to retrieve the URL
> http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/datasets/csb/ch11b.dat.  The precise
> error it encountered was:
>
> Error in strsplit(grep("Content-Length", b, value = TRUE), ":")[[1]] :
>         subscript out of bounds
>
> So, it looks like the data it read from that URL was not what was
> expected.  I tried mimicking the script's request of the header
> information for that URL, and got back the following header lines:
>
> HTTP/1.1 200 OK
> Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 23:22:06 GMT
> Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Red Hat Linux)
> Last-Modified: Fri, 19 May 1995 10:27:04 GMT
> ETag: "7bc27-836-39a78e00"
> Accept-Ranges: bytes
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> Content-length: 2102
> Connection: Keep-Alive
>
> The script appears to be looking for a "Content-Length" field, but as
> you can see the returned header is "Content-length" with a lower-case
> l.  I don't know R yet, so I'm not sure if the grep in the test code
> is case-sensitive or not, but if it is, that would seem to be the
> problem.  But then, surely everyone would be hitting this error?

The grep is indeed case sensitive, as a quick test can show. However,  
the header I got back when I tried the above address had Length in it:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 01:40:48 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Red Hat Linux)
Last-Modified: Fri, 19 May 1995 10:27:04 GMT
ETag: "7bc27-836-39a78e00"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 2102
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
X-Pad: avoid browser bug

( I used curl for this, if it makes a difference)

Hope this helps in some way.

>       --Paul

Haris