[R] gsub: replacing a.*a if no occurence of b in .*

[Ulrich Keller]

Duncan Temple Lang <duncan <at> wald.ucdavis.edu> writes:
> If xmlTreeParse() is actually causing R to exit (i.e. what some people
> refer to as crashing), as Jeff (Horner) said, we would like to be able
> to stop this. We will need the actual text/file passed to
> xmlTreeParse(), version information of operating system, R and the XML
> package and any locale information.  However, if by crashing you mean
> generates an error, then that is expected on malformed XML inputs.


Thanks Duncan and all the other helpful people. I will try the suggestions
tomorrow. Of course it would be best to fix the generation mechanism, I'm going
to notify the responsible developer as soon as I can, but unfortunately I
already have a few thousand files that have to be parsed.

R (2.4.1) really exits, on Linux (Ubuntu Edgy) I get an endless series of
segfault errors like this one:

 *** caught segfault ***
address 0x75716e6d, cause 'memory not mapped'

until I kill the process. On Windows (XP SP2), R exits too. Note that this only
happens when I read the file to a character vector (of length one) and then pass
this to xmlTreeParse(). When I let xmlTreeParse() read the file directly, it
prints an error message and everything is fine. I just remember that I had a
similar problem with XML files that contained ISO8859-encoded text. Reading the
files directly caused an error message, passing them as a character vector
caused a crash.

I will send you one of the offending files by mail, plus one that is well-formed.

Thanks again,

Uli