[R] Error: Line starting ' ...' is malformed!

[MacQueen, Don]

A recent version of the R extension manual says,

"For maximal portability, the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file should be written
entirely in ASCII — if this is not possible it must contain an ‘Encoding’
field (see below)."

It also says, regarding the DESCRIPTION file,

"Fields start with an ASCII name immediately followed by a colon: the
value starts after the colon and a space."

-- 
Don MacQueen

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
7000 East Ave., L-627
Livermore, CA 94550
925-423-1062





On 7/26/13 11:08 AM, "Ross Boylan" <ross at biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:

>A DESCRIPTION file begins with 0xFFFE and
>$ file DESCRIPTION
>DESCRIPTION: Little-endian UTF-16 Unicode text, with CRLF, CR line
>terminators
>
>I think it was created on Windows.
>
>In R (2,15,1 on Debian GNU/Linux), using roxygen2, I get
>> roxygenize("../GitHub/mice")
>Error: Line starting '��P ...' is malformed!
>
>Enter a frame number, or 0 to exit
>
>1: roxygenize("../GitHub/mice")
>2: read.description(DESCRIPTION)
>3: read.dcf(file)
>
>Selection: 3
>Called from: read.description(DESCRIPTION)
>Browse[1]> Q
>
>I'm not sure if the first 2 characters after line starting ', which are
>octal 
>377, 376, will survive email; I stripped them out of the subject line.
>
>The files (DESCRIPTION isn't the only one) have also caused trouble for
>git 
>(even on  Windows 7), since it thinks they are binary.
>
>Any advice about what to do?
>
>I'm reluctant to change the format of the files because it's not my
>package.
>
>Ross Boylan
>
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