[R] String buffer

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 20 May 2008, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> 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.

It is documented, on the help page!

      'as.character' truncates components of language objects to 500
      characters (was about 70 before 1.3.1).

>> 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!
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595