Why does substr<- truncate and not replace...

Thomas Vogels <tov at ece.cmu.edu> writes:

... when the replacement string is shorter than the portion of the
string to be replaced?

The documentation to substr (in R 1.3.1) gives me:

     If the portion to be replaced is longer than the replacement
     string, then only the portion the length of the string is
     replaced.

And so I try:

R> x <- "abcdef"
R> substr(x,2,3) <- "xy" #ok
R> x
[1] "axydef"
R> substr(x,2,3) <- "w" #ko
R> x
[1] "aw"

hmm, I would have expected "awdef".  Am I reading the docs wrong?  (Or
am I just blinded to expect this string because that's what Perl would do?)

Thanks!
  -tom

Looks like a bit of a bug. I bet the \0 terminator gets copied in from
the replacement.