-----Original Message-----
From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf
Of Herv? Pag?s
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 3:47 PM
To: Duncan Murdoch
Cc: christophe.genolini at u-paris10.fr; r-devel at r-project.org; Christophe Genolini
Subject: Re: [Rd] Comments in the DESCRIPTION file
On 12/06/2012 03:41 PM, Herv? Pag?s wrote:
Hi,
Wouldn't be hard to patch read.dcf() though.
FWIW here's the "comment aware" version of read.dcf() I've been using
for years:
.removeCommentLines <- function(infile=stdin(), outfile=stdout())
{
if (is.character(infile)) {
infile <- file(infile, "r")
on.exit(close(infile))
}
if (is.character(outfile)) {
outfile <- file(outfile, "w")
on.exit({close(infile); close(outfile)})
}
while (TRUE) {
lines <- readLines(infile, n=25000L)
if (length(lines) == 0L)
return()
keep_it <- substr(lines, 1L, 1L) != "#"
writeLines(lines[keep_it], outfile)
}
}
read.dcf2 <- function(file, ...)
{
clean_file <- file.path(tempdir(), "clean.dcf")
mmh, would certainly be better to just use tempfile() here.
H.
.removeCommentLines(file, clean_file)
on.exit(file.remove(clean_file))
read.dcf(clean_file, ...)
}
Cheers,
H.
On 11/07/2012 01:53 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 12-11-07 4:26 AM, Christophe Genolini wrote:
Hi all,
Is it possible to add comments in the DESCRIPTION file?
The read.dcf function is used to read the DESCRIPTION file, and it
doesn't support comments. (The current Debian control format
description does appear to support comments with leading # markers, but
R's read.dcf function doesn't support these.)
You could probably get away with something like
#: this is a comment
since unrecognized fields are ignored, but I think this fact is
undocumented so I would say it's safer to assume that comments are not
supported.
Duncan Murdoch