R 3.2, Mac 10.10.3 : help.search showing error
On Jun 13, 2015, at 11:04 PM, Berend Hasselman wrote:
On 14-06-2015, at 06:25, Ramnik Bansal <ramnik.bansal at gmail.com> wrote: Thanks. But it seems to be an R 3.2.0 specific problem.
I replied with the following to a similar message on R-devel.
There was no error either with using help() or using the Mac GUI package manager. Those were the reported difficulties previously reported.
???????????????????????? See this thread on R-SIG-Mac https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/2015-April/011420.html This may help. Get R 3.2.0-patched or even the release candidate for R 3.2.1 ????????????????????????
The error I am getting was from the most recent R 3.2.0 downloaded yesterday. There is no 3.2.0-Patched for Mavericks. The release candidate, R 3.2.1 RC, is marked on the ATT Research webpage as failing Make and it indeed fails to launch. I would NOT recommend that anyone accept that advice. But maybe it is a Mac-specific problem. When I remove the crippled R 3.2.1 RC and reinstall the R 3.2.0 and run from a Terminal window I do not get the help.search() error. So copying to R SIG Mac, and will not copy R-help on any further efforts.
David.
>
> Berend
>
>
>> On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 8:42 AM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Jun 13, 2015, at 7:41 AM, Ramnik Bansal wrote:
>>>
>>>> Getting following error in using help.search
>>>>
>>>>> utils::help.search("linear models")
>>>> Error in help(db[i, "topic"], package = db[i, "Package"], lib.loc =
>>> lib, :
>>>> 'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or reserved word
>>>
>>> I first tried this in a Mac running the SL version for R 3.1.2 and did not
>>> get this error. I updated my Mavericks laptop to R 3.2.0 and can now
>>> reproduce this error. It does not seem to depend on having a space in the
>>> argument. It seems to be thrown by this segment of code in the
>>> `help()`-function:
>>>
>>> ischar <- tryCatch(is.character(topic) && length(topic) ==
>>> 1L, error = identity)
>>> if (inherits(ischar, "error"))
>>> ischar <- FALSE
>>> if (!ischar) {
>>> reserved <- c("TRUE", "FALSE", "NULL", "Inf", "NaN",
>>> "NA", "NA_integer_", "NA_real_", "NA_complex_", "NA_character_")
>>> stopic <- deparse(substitute(topic))
>>> if (!is.name(substitute(topic)) && !stopic %in% reserved)
>>> stop("'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or
>>> reserved word")
>>>
>>> If gone through the `help.search` function code and cannot find where the
>>> `help` function is actually called. This seems unlikely to be a
>>> Mac-specific problem.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> example(help.search)
>>>>
>>>> hlp.sr> help.search("linear models") # In case you forgot how to fit
>>>> linear
>>>> Error in help(db[i, "topic"], package = db[i, "Package"], lib.loc =
>>> lib, :
>>>> 'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or reserved word
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> How to sort this?
>>>>
>>>> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
>>> David Winsemius
>>> Alameda, CA, USA
>>>
>>>
>>
>> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
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>
David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA