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

[Paul Lynch]

Thanks for giving it a try.  It is very odd that you got
"Content-Length" when I am getting "Content-length".  I just tried
curl (I had been using telnet to port 80) and I got the same (error
causing) "length" result:

> curl --head http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/datasets/csb/ch11b.dat
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 16:10:41 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

Perhaps we are hitting different web servers?  I ran nslookup on
www.stats.ox.ac.uk, and it appears to be an alias for
web2.stats.ox.ac.uk.  Is that the machine you are getting?  What
happens if you run curl against web2, i.e.:
   curl --head http://web2.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/datasets/csb/ch11b.dat

?
(I get "Content-length").
Thanks,
     --Paul

On 2/12/07, Charilaos Skiadas <skiadas at hanover.edu> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>