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help (using ?) does not handle trailing whitespace (PR#11537)

4 messages · Brian Ripley, Tim Hesterberg

#
Results in:

No documentation for 'agrep ' in specified packages and libraries:
you could try 'help.search("agrep ")'

There is white space after agrep, that ? doesn't ignore.


--please do not edit the information below--

Version:
 platform = i486-pc-linux-gnu
 arch = i486
 os = linux-gnu
 system = i486, linux-gnu
 status = 
 major = 2
 minor = 7.0
 year = 2008
 month = 04
 day = 22
 svn rev = 45424
 language = R
 version.string = R version 2.7.0 (2008-04-22)

Locale:
LC_CTYPE=en_US;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=C;LC_COLLATE=C;LC_MONETARY=C;LC_MESSAGES=en_US;LC_PAPER=en_US;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

Search Path:
 .GlobalEnv, package:stats, package:graphics, package:grDevices, package:utils, package:datasets, package:showStructure, package:Rcode, package:splus2R, package:methods, Autoloads, package:base
1 day later
#
We don't know how to reproduce this: 'whitespace' is not specific enough.

R's tokenizer breaks input at spaces, so a space would never be part of 
that expression.  And tabs don't even get to the parser in interactive 
use, and you cannot mean a newline.  So exactly what do you mean by 
'whitespace'?

The character in your email as received here is an ASCII space, and that 
is used to end the token on all my systems.  That's not to say that you 
didn't type something else that looks like a space (e.g. a nbspace) since 
email systems are fickle.

None of my guesses worked, so we need precise reproduction instructions.
On Thu, 29 May 2008, rocket at google.com wrote:

            

  
    
#
By whitespace, I mean either a space or tab (preceding the newline).

I'm using ESS:
ess-version's value is "5.3.6"
GNU Emacs 21.4.1 (i486-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars) of
2007-08-28 on terranova, modified by Debian

I have the following in my .emacs:
(load "ess-5.3.6/lisp/ess-site")
(setq ess-tab-always-indent nil)
(setq ess-fancy-comments nil)

I have not edited ess-site.el


On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 12:26 PM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
#
I think it is ESS that is parsing this as a help request (so it can divert 
it to an ESS buffer).

Looks like this is an ESS issue, not an R one.

Using ?"agrep " will fail in R, but that seems correct as there is no 
topic "agrep ".
On Fri, 30 May 2008, Tim Hesterberg wrote: