On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 6:16 AM, Martin Maechler
<maech...@stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
>>>>>> Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendi...@gmail.com>
>>>>>> on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:10:43 -0500 writes:
>
> > If a path name ends in slash then file.exists says it does
> > not exist. I would have expected these to all return
> > TRUE.
>
> >> file.exists("/Program Files")
> > [1] TRUE
> >> file.exists("/Program Files/")
> > [1] FALSE
> >> file.exists(normalizePath("/Program Files/"))
> > [1] FALSE
> >> R.version.string
> > [1] "R version 3.0.2 Patched (2013-11-25 r64299)"
>
> I would also have expected all these to work,
> but that is only because I do not use Windows;
> indeed, for me (Linux Fedora 19, but I'm pretty sure *any*
> version):
>
> > dir.create("/tmp/foo bar")
> > normalizePath("/tmp/foo bar/")
> [1] "/tmp/foo bar"
> > file.exists("/tmp/foo bar/")
> [1] TRUE
> > file.exists(normalizePath("/tmp/foo bar/"))
> [1] TRUE
> >
>
>
> > I am using Windows 8.1 .
>
> poor you ;-) yes, don't take it personally
>
> Last but not least ?file.exists in its 'Details' section
> mentions several times how Windows behaves differently from the
> civilized world (:-)
> notably that it also says
>
> (However,
> directory names must not include a trailing backslash or slash on
> Windows.)
>
> So, all seems as documented, but unfortunately your (and most
> probably not only yours !!) expectations are different.
> I agree that this is quite unfortunate, and we all would be
> happy if OSes were consistent here.
>
> I wonder if R couldn't help you (and many others) better to
> gloss over these OS differences in a helpful way.
> This list may be a good place to discuss such proposals ...
>
I do find that sometimes I have to deal with paths that I did not
create that end in / or \. At the moment I am using this to avoid the
problem:
File.exists <- function(x) {
if (.Platform$OS == "windows" && grepl("[/\\]$", x)) {
file.exists(dirname(x))
} else file.exists(x)
}
but it would be nice if that could be done by file.exists itself.
--
Statistics & Software Consulting
GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP
email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com
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