random output with sub(fixed = TRUE)
Well, who am I to break this long-standing ritual? :)
Interestingly, while the printed output looks wrong, I get
> v <- paste(0:10, "asdf", sep = ".")
> a <- sub(".asdf", "", v, fixed = TRUE)
> b <- as.character(0:10)
> identical(a, b)
[1] TRUE
>
-roger
Peter Dalgaard wrote:
"Roger D. Peng" <rpeng at jhsph.edu> writes:
I've noticed what I think is curious behavior in using 'sub(fixed = TRUE)' and
was wondering if my expectation is incorrect. Here is one example:
v <- paste(0:10, "asdf", sep = ".")
sub(".asdf", "", v, fixed = TRUE)
The results I get are
sub(".asdf", "", v, fixed = TRUE)
[1] "0" "1\0st\0\0" "2\0<af>\001\0\0" "3\0<af>\001\0\0" [5] "4\0mes\0" "5\0<ba>\001\0\0" "6\0\0\0\0\0" "7\0\0\0m\0" [9] "8\0\0\0t\0" "9\0<fe>\0\0\0" "10\0\0\0\0\0"
I expected "0" in the first entry and everything else would be unchanged. Your results may vary since every time I run 'sub()' in this way, I get a slightly different answer in entires 2 through 11. As it turns out, 'gsub(fixed = TRUE)' gives me the answer I *actually* wanted, which was to replace the string in every entry. But I still think the behavior of 'sub(fixed = TRUE) is a bit odd.
version
_ platform x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu arch x86_64 os linux-gnu system x86_64, linux-gnu status major 2 minor 2.1 year 2005 month 12 day 20 svn rev 36812 language R
Argh... year 2005 month 12 day 21 and something like this gets discovered. It's a ritual, I tell ya, a ritual! If you look at the output and terminate all strings at the embedded \0, it looks much more sensible, so it should be fairly easy to spot the cause of this bug...
Roger D. Peng | http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~rpeng/