[R] platform dependent regex

[jim holtman]

why 3 parameters on the 'grepl'?  Did you mean to say:

​grepl("\\W", "س")  # FALSE


Jim Holtman
Data Munger Guru

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.

On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 11:55 AM, Ista Zahn <istazahn at gmail.com> wrote:

> I just spent a day and a half debugging someone's code, only to
> discover that the problem is platform dependent regular expressions.
> For example:
>
> ## Windows:
> grepl("\\W", "", "س")  # TRUE
>
> ## OS X:
> grepl("\\W", "", "س")  # TRUE
>
> ## Linux:
> grepl("\\W", "", "س")  # FALSE
>
> Ouch. The documentation does say "Certain named classes of characters
> are predefined.  Their interpretation depends on the _locale_", but
> that doesn't seem to cover it given that the locale on OS X and Linux
> was the same (en_US.UTF-8).
>
> Question: Is this considered a bug, and if so what can I do to help
> fix it? I've checked and the issue is present in both r-patched and
> r-devel.
>
> Best,
> Ista
>
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