R 3.2.0 Mavericks/Yosemite: help.search showing error

On Jun 14, 2015, at 8:18 AM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:


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.

help.search("linear models")

sessionInfo()

-- 
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?

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David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA

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David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA