[R] Odp: Character String length

[Petr PIKAL]

Hi


r-help-bounces at r-project.org napsal dne 10.12.2009 11:05:15:

> 
> Hi all, I have a script running on a Windows XP 32 bit OS under R 2.9.2
> 
> I am experiencing a character string limitation of 64 chars. Is this a
> general limitation of R or am I missing something?
> 

Here is a snippet from Prof.Ripley's answer to similar question from 2001. 
I do not know if anything changed from that time but I hardly expect the 
string limit was decreased. Maybe you refer to number of characters 
displayed on console on one line, which can be controlled via .Rconsole 
file or through Rgui menu (Gui/Preferences).

> If one attempts to read a character string from a file using scan, 
> and the string comprises more than 8190 characters, then the string 
> is truncated to this length, and no warning is issued. 
> 
> I've observed this both in the Linux and Win implementations of R 
1.3.0. 
> S-PLUS (v. 6.0 rel. 1 for Sun SPARC0 does not suffer from this 
behavior. 
Yes, that's an R limitation. Why is it a problem? I think you would 
do better using readLines if it is a line-oriented file. AFAIK that is 
unlimited. 
It would be easy to issue a warning, quite a bit harder to remove the 
limit 
(which dates from the days when character strings were in most places 
limited to 8191 chars). 
Regards
Petr


> Any help appreciated.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Ian 
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