R CMD Rdconv drops sections: arguments, seealso, examples (PR#9649)

Bill,

Now we have access again to the R-bugs repository (the database has been
offline for about a week) I can try to understand this.

This is a follow up to PR#9645 which was itself a follow up to PR#9606,
which was a report that Rdconv silently drops sections it makes no sense
of.  (The latter is well known, and that's why R CMD check has an
independent check of Rd syntax using R code.)

And this supersedes the suggestion in PR#9645, both of which are that
Rdconv should detect unclosed sections and throw an error.

It is not clear to me that throwing an error is helpful as it would stop
the package installation process when all but one section in one .Rd file
would be useful.  But it would seem good to give a warning, and so I
propose that we adapt your code to do so.

Does that reasonably reflect the various PRs?

Brian


On Tue, 1 May 2007, bill at insightful.com wrote:

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 bill at insightful.com wrote:

On Tue, 10 Apr 2007 timh at insightful.com wrote:

I've created a .Rd file (below), then converted that to .sgml using
	R CMD Rdconv --type=Ssgm combn.Rd  > combn.sgml
The output (shown below) is missing some of the sections:
	arguments
	seealso
	examples
If instead I convert to .d (below), the same sections are missing,
and the "note" section is included but without the necessary newline.

The underlying problem was that there were some unmatched open-braces.
(or 'brackets'?) The attached patch to share/perl/R/Rdconv.pm:mark_brackets()
seems to detect unmatched open and close braces and throw an error:

   % R CMD INSTALL -l /tmp/Rlib timhPackage
   * Installing *source* package 'timhPackage' ...
   ** help

  >>> Building/Updating help pages for package 'timhPackage'

        Formats: text html latex example
   Rdconv(): mismatched braces in help file timh.Rd on or after line 12
   ERROR: building help failed for package 'timhPackage'
   ** Removing '/tmp/Rlib/timhPackage'
   ** Restoring previous '/tmp/Rlib/timhPackage'

The code to report the line number doesn't work quite right
since any "% comment" lines in the Rd file have been removed
from $complete_text by the time we get here.  I fudged by
putting 'on or after line XXX' in the error message.

The following patch adds a little more information (the
name of the \tag or whether it is an unmatched { or })
to the error message, so Tim's example results in

   % R CMD INSTALL -l /tmp/Rlib timhPackage
   * Installing *source* package 'timhPackage' ...
   ** help

   >>> Building/Updating help pages for package 'timhPackage'

        Formats: text html latex example
   Rdconv(): mismatched braces ('\arguments{') in help file timh.Rd on or after line 12
   ERROR: building help failed for package 'timhPackage'
   ** Removing '/tmp/Rlib/timhPackage'
   ** Restoring previous '/tmp/Rlib/timhPackage'


*** Rdconv.pm~	2007-03-29 19:05:08.000000000 -0700
--- Rdconv.pm	2007-05-01 10:28:55.000000000 -0700
***************
*** 254,259 ****
--- 254,275 ----
 	$complete_text =~ s/{([^{}]*)}/$id$1$id/s;
 	print STDERR "." if $debug;
     }
+     # Any remaining brackets must be unmatched ones, hence report error.
+     if ($complete_text =~ /([{}])/s) {
+         # Would like to tell which which line has unmatched { or },
+         # but lines starting with % have already been removed.
+         # Hence the 'on or after' in the message.
+         my $badlineno=0 ;
+ 	my $extra_info = "(\'$1\')" ;
+         if ($complete_text =~ /(\\\w+{)/) {
+ 		$extra_info = "(\'$1\')" ;
+ 	}
+         foreach my $line (split /\n/, $complete_text) {
+             $badlineno++;
+             last if ($line =~ /[{}]/) ;
+         }
+         die "Rdconv(): mismatched braces $extra_info in help file $Rdname on or after line $badlineno\n" ;
+     }
 }

 sub unmark_brackets {