[R-sig-finance] (i) bug report in listFinCenter and (ii) question

[Franklin Parlamis]

     Hello all.

     I am using the Mac OS X version of R (Aqua GUI 1.12, R Framework  
2.1.1).

    (i) The function 'listFinCenter' in the fCalendar package does  
not work.  Having checked the code of that function it appears the  
problem is in the passing of the '*' regular expression pattern to  
the R grep function.  R complains that this is not a valid regular  
expression.  I am not sure whether this bug is the result of more  
liberal regular expression matching on the Windows platform (on which  
fCalendar has been exclusively tested) than on UNIX, or whether it  
results from the fact that R, as of version 2.1.0, has switched its  
standard for regular expression matching to glibc 2.3.3 from grep 2.4.2.

     In any event, I have found that replacing the pattern '*' with  
the pattern '.*' will do the trick (although I must admit the entire  
grep call seems a bit superfluous to me--perhaps the function was  
originally intended to do more than it currently does).

    (ii) As we all know by now, fCalendar needs the TZ environment  
variable to be set to 'GMT'.  However, as installed on my Mac, a  
Sys.getenv() call returned no environment variable named TZ.  My  
solution was to use Sys.putenv() in my .Rprofile file to initialize  
and set the TZ variable to 'GMT'.  This stopped the program from  
complaining, but I am a bit concerned that the solution will not be a  
complete one.  My system clock is still set to my local time zone and  
daylight savings rules, so that other programs in other environments  
on my system know the time to be different than R.  Does anyone  
foresee a problem with this workaround?  Is there a better way?

     Thanks in advance.

     Franklin Parlamis