[R] R 3.2, Mac 10.10.3 : help.search showing error

[Berend Hasselman]

> On 14-06-2015, at 06:25, Ramnik Bansal <ramnik.bansal at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks. But it seems to be an R 3.2.0 specific problem.
> 

I replied with the following to a similar message on R-devel.

————————————————————————
See this thread on R-SIG-Mac

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/2015-April/011420.html

This may help.
Get R 3.2.0-patched or even the release candidate for R 3.2.1
————————————————————————

Berend


> On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 8:42 AM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net>
> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jun 13, 2015, at 7:41 AM, Ramnik Bansal wrote:
>> 
>>> Getting following error in using help.search
>>> 
>>>> utils::help.search("linear models")
>>> Error in help(db[i, "topic"], package = db[i, "Package"], lib.loc =
>> lib,  :
>>> 'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or reserved word
>> 
>> I first tried this in a Mac running the SL version for R 3.1.2 and did not
>> get this error. I updated my Mavericks laptop to R 3.2.0 and can now
>> reproduce this error. It does not seem to depend on having a space in the
>> argument. It seems to be thrown by this segment of code in the
>> `help()`-function:
>> 
>>   ischar <- tryCatch(is.character(topic) && length(topic) ==
>>       1L, error = identity)
>>   if (inherits(ischar, "error"))
>>       ischar <- FALSE
>>   if (!ischar) {
>>       reserved <- c("TRUE", "FALSE", "NULL", "Inf", "NaN",
>>           "NA", "NA_integer_", "NA_real_", "NA_complex_", "NA_character_")
>>       stopic <- deparse(substitute(topic))
>>       if (!is.name(substitute(topic)) && !stopic %in% reserved)
>>           stop("'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or
>> reserved word")
>> 
>> If gone through the `help.search` function code and cannot find where the
>> `help` function is actually called. This seems unlikely to be a
>> Mac-specific problem.
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> example(help.search)
>>> 
>>> hlp.sr> help.search("linear models")    # In case you forgot how to fit
>>> linear
>>> Error in help(db[i, "topic"], package = db[i, "Package"], lib.loc =
>> lib,  :
>>> 'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or reserved word
>>> 
>>> 
>>> How to sort this?
>>> 
>>>      [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>> 
>> David Winsemius
>> Alameda, CA, USA
>> 
>> 
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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