Error: Line starting ' ...' is malformed!
On Monday, July 29, 2013 07:47:34 AM MacQueen, Don wrote:
A recent version of the R extension manual says, "For maximal portability, the ?DESCRIPTION? file should be written entirely in ASCII ? if this is not possible it must contain an ?Encoding? field (see below)." It also says, regarding the DESCRIPTION file, "Fields start with an ASCII name immediately followed by a colon: the value starts after the colon and a space."
That, plus the fact that all the other files were in plain ASCII, convinced me to recode DESCRIPTION to ASCII. Which solved the problem. I guess, at least in this context, ASCII is considered an encoding as well as a character set. Thanks. Ross P.S. For the record, I used recode on linux to do the conversion; iconv is another utility that would probably work.
A DESCRIPTION file begins with 0xFFFE and $ file DESCRIPTION DESCRIPTION: Little-endian UTF-16 Unicode text, with CRLF, CR line terminators I think it was created on Windows. In R (2,15,1 on Debian GNU/Linux), using roxygen2, I get
roxygenize("../GitHub/mice")
Error: Line starting '??P ...' is malformed!
Enter a frame number, or 0 to exit
1: roxygenize("../GitHub/mice")
2: read.description(DESCRIPTION)
3: read.dcf(file)
Selection: 3
Called from: read.description(DESCRIPTION)
Browse[1]> Q
I'm not sure if the first 2 characters after line starting ', which are
octal
377, 376, will survive email; I stripped them out of the subject line.
The files (DESCRIPTION isn't the only one) have also caused trouble for
git
(even on Windows 7), since it thinks they are binary.
Any advice about what to do?
I'm reluctant to change the format of the files because it's not my
package.
Ross Boylan
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