[R] String buffer

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 5/20/2008 12:58 PM, Applejus wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have an expression "a" in R that has about 2300 characters and I want to
> convert it to a string using toString or as.character. The problem is I am
> only getting the first 500 or so characters when I convert it to string. I
> tried to use substring in order to convert one bunch at a time, but when I
> type substring(a, 498, 1000) I get only 2 characters, meaning it seems there
> is a limit of 500 characters at most, even for the substring function.

When you deparse a long expression, it comes back as a multi-element 
character vector.  as.character() only returns the first element.  You 
can get all of them by calling deparse() directly, and then perhaps 
you'll want to paste them together.

I'm not sure if this is a bug in as.character, or just an undocumented 
limitation.

> 
> The weird part is that the conversion with as.character works fine with
> Splus, but not in R.

I wouldn't call it "weird"; there are lots of differences between the 
two programs.  They have been developed independently.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Could anyone help me out? Is there a string buffer function like that of
> java? Should I change something in the console configuration? (I tried to
> increase the buffer but it still doesn't work) 
> 
> Thanks!