[R] copying huge strings via clipboard?

[David Winsemius]

On 3/4/22 08:45, Carl Witthoft wrote:
> Hi,
> This is on Windows10 via the R gui  .  I, admittedly inadvisably, 
> tried to create a new character object by first copying a 1-million 
> character string (including lead and trail "'" chars) to the clipboard 
> and then, in the console,
>
> >> foo <-
> and hitting "paste"
>
> What I found is that, around 5000 characters, a newline ( "\n") char 
> showed up.  Is this something that the Windows Clipboard does, or 
> something odd about pasting into a command in R?

I'm the wrong person to comment on Windows clipboard features.

ISTR that there is a character limit for R command line input, at least 
in some or perhaps all R installations.

Subject: 	[R] parsing - input buffer overflow 
<http://markmail.org/message/iyjlmfsb4kp63cyi> 	permalink 
<http://markmail.org/message/iyjlmfsb4kp63cyi>
From: 	Prof Brian Ripley (rip... using stats.ox.ac.uk)
Date: 	Jun 13, 2008 1:52:06 am
List: 	org.r-project.r-help

"R does have limits on the command line length (1024 bytes up to 
R-devel, 4096 bytes there). What happens if you exceed that depends on 
the interface you are using (and you have not told us). Beyond that, the 
parser has a limit of MAXELTSIZE (8192 bytes) on strings.

I don't see any need for 'improvement' though: why are you entering very 
long strings as part of the R program? They are data, and e.g. 
readLines() and scan() have no limits on string length beyond those 
imposed by R's internals (2^31-1 bytes)."


I think that info is still current since a search of the 
../manuals/R-int page says:

--- copied

The|R_StringBuffer|structure needs to be initialized, for example by

static R_StringBuffer ex_buff = {NULL, 0, MAXELTSIZE};

which uses a default size of|MAXELTSIZE = 8192|bytes.Most current uses 
have a static|R_StringBuffer|structure, which allows the (default-sized) 
buffer to be shared between calls to e.g.|grep|and even between 
functions: this will need to be changed if R ever allows concurrent 
evaluation threads.

--- end copy


-- 

David


>
> Postscript:  using
>
> >>  bar <- readChar('thefile.txt',1e6)
>
> the import works perfectly.
>
>