[R-pkg-devel] "non-ASCII input" and "--data-compress" ignored

[Ivan Krylov]

On Fri, 17 Jul 2020 02:02:36 -0500
Spencer Graves <spencer.graves using effectivedefense.org> wrote:

> If I copy this URL into a browser and back out again, I get 
> the following:
> 
> 
> https://www.americansecurityproject.org/ASP%20Reports/Ref%200072%20-%20North%20Korea%E2%80%99s%20Nuclear%20Program%20.pdf
> 
> 
>        However, if I use this inside "\href", "R CMD check" doesn't 
> recognize the close curly bracket because of the presence of the 
> non-ASCII characters.

WRE section 2.3 [*] provides an example of \href with RFC3986
percent-encoding. Since % is a comment character in Rd, the percent
signs have to be escaped with backslashes:

\href{https://www.americansecurityproject.org/ASP\%20Reports/Ref\%200072\%20-\%20North\%20Korea\%E2\%80\%99s\%20Nuclear\%20Program\%20.pdf}{Derek
Bolton (2012) North Korea's Nuclear Program}

This only works correctly in R >= 3.1.3, but results in correct output
in both HTML and PDF formats.

Alternatively, it should be possible to declare the encoding of the Rd
file using \encoding{UTF-8} (WRE 2.14 [**]), but in my tests (R 3.6.3,
could have been fixed in later versions) it results in a broken link in
Rd2pdf output.

>        I'm getting, " Note: significantly better compression could be 
> obtained by using R CMD build --resave-data".  I get this message
> even though I use "R CMD build --data-compress Ecdat".  I also tried
> "R CMD build Ecdat --data-compress" and got the same result.

The note offers you to try adding --resave-data to R CMD build, not
--data-compress. What happens if you use --resave-data=best?
--data-compress doesn't seem to be an R CMD build option; at least
it's not mentioned in R CMD build --help.

WRE 1.1.6 [***] provides an example of --data-compress as an option of
R CMD INSTALL (not build).

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan

P.S.

> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Please don't post in HTML.

[*]
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Marking-text

[**]
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Encoding

[***]
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Data-in-packages