On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 15:37 -0500, Marc Schwartz (via MN) wrote: > Hi all, > > I am setting up some R program files for use by our DB programmers to > enable them to utilize some R functions which will be called from within > TCL code. R has been installed on an RHEL server and R will process the > results of SQL queries against an Oracle database. > > In some cases, they will generate a data file to be read in and > processed by R, in others they will simply make the tabulated results > available. > > I know that I could do the SQL queries from within R, however, this is > the approach that has been defined for now for various reasons. > > I wanted to provide some flexibility for them, by passing some of the > tabulated results via command line arguments to R functions, rather than > via environment variables, which is easier for them to do in TCL it > would seem. They would create these values at run time, based upon specs > that I give them. > > Using the following as an example: > > $ R --slave --vanilla --args "c(5,5)" "c(.5,.5)" < RScript.R > > I can then process "c(5,5)" and "c(.5,.5)" as two arguments, via: > > Args <- commandArgs() > > where the two arguments are Args[5] and Args[6], respectively. I can > then of course pass these as "eval(parse(text = Args[5]))" to other R > functions. > > > However, if there is any whitespace in the two arguments, such as: > > R --slave --vanilla --args "c(5, 5)" "c(.5, .5)" < RScript.R > > even though surrounded by double quotes (or single quotes or > backquotes), the two arguments are parsed as four. > > Is this behavior expected? I was under the impression, from other C > based programs and bash shell scripts for example, that the use of the > double quotes would wrap such text and thus be parsed as a single > argument. > > This is using: > > Version 2.1.1 Patched (2005-09-22) on FC4.
Apologies for replying to my own post here, but I wanted to follow up with a solution provided by Robert McGehee, which works here. The solution is as follows: echo "a <- c(5, 5); b <- c(0.5, 0.5)" | cat - RScript.R | R --slave \ --vanilla This uses echo and cat to pre-pend the 'a' and 'b' vector assignments to the R program file, before passing the whole thing to R. This then allows for arguments with embedded whitespace to be passed as required at run time. Thanks Robert! Marc ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
