Word boundaries and gregexpr in R 2.2.1 (PR#8547)

Full_Name: Stefan Th. Gries
Version: 2.2.1
OS: Windows XP (Home and Professional)
Submission from: (NULL) (68.6.34.104)


The problem is this: I have a vector of two character strings.

text<-c("This is a first example sentence.", "And this is a second example    

sentence.")

If I now look for word boundaries with regexpr, this is what I get:

regexpr("\\b", text, perl=TRUE)

[1] 1 1
attr(,"match.length")
[1] 0 0

So far, so good. But with gregexpr I get:

gregexpr("\\b", text, perl=TRUE)

Error: cannot allocate vector of size 524288 Kb
In addition: Warning messages:
1: Reached total allocation of 1015Mb: see help(memory.size)
2: Reached total allocation of 1015Mb: see help(memory.size)

Why don't I get the locations and extensions of all word boundaries?

I am using R 2.2.1 on a machine running Windows XP:

R.version

_
platform i386-pc-mingw32
arch     i386
os       mingw32
system   i386, mingw32
status
major    2
minor    2.1
year     2005
month    12
day      20
svn rev  36812
language R