This seems of historical interest only.
allowEscapes is currently (in R-devel, where development happens) an
argument to read.table.
We do ask people to check the current version!
On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Gordon Smyth wrote:
>
>> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> From: Gordon Smyth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> Subject: R 2.1.1: read.table processes C-style escapes
>> Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 12:51:45 +1000
>>
>> In R 2.1.1, the default behaviour of scan() was changed to process all
>> C-style escapes, even when a delimiter was specified using the 'sep'
>> argument. A new argument 'allowEscapes' was introduced to turn this
>> processing off.
>>
>> Because read.table() calls scan(), read.table() inherits the new default
>> behaviour of scan() but without a way to turn it off. For example, reading
>> a file testdata.txt' containing
>>
>> X
>> A
>> \0
>> C
>>
>> produces
>>
>>> read.delim("testdata.txt")
>> [1] X
>> <0 rows> (or 0-length row.names)
>>
>> It seems that all the occurances of scan() within read.table() need to
>> have 'allowEscapes=FALSE' added to the argument string.
>
> Or, alternatively and perhaps better, scan() could regain some of its
> earlier behaviour, to process C-style escapes by default only when 'sep' is
> NULL or empty. It seems, to me at least, that C-style escape sequences make
> sense only in some sort of source code, and delimited text can't be source
> code.
>
> Gordon
>
>> Gordon
>>
>>> version
>> _
>> platform i386-pc-mingw32
>> arch i386
>> os mingw32
>> system i386, mingw32
>> status Patched
>> major 2
>> minor 1.1
>> year 2005
>> month 07
>> day 22
>> language R
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
>
--
Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
