rawToChar(raw(0))
On 5/21/08, Henrik Bengtsson <hb at stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
Hi, right now we have (on R v2.7.0 patched (2008-04-23 r45466)) that:
> rawToChar(raw(0))
[1] ""
> rawToChar(raw(0), multiple=TRUE)
character(0) Is this intended or should both return character(0)? Personally, I would prefer that an empty input vector returns an empty output vector.
I don't see why; rawToChar(, multiple=FALSE) is meant to be a map from an n-vector to a scalar. Why should there be an exception when n==0? Would you expect mean(numeric(0)) to return numeric(0)?
Same should then apply to charToRaw(), but right now we get:
> x <- character(0) > charToRaw(x)
Error in charToRaw(x) : argument must be a character vector of length 1
The error message says it all: charToRaw() maps a scalar to an n-vector. For vectors of length > 1, it uses the first element with a warning. No comments on the rest. -Deepayan
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