I think the problem in R-devel happens when there are non-ASCII characters in any of the strings passed to gsub.
txt <- vapply(list(as.raw(c(0x41, 0x6d, 0xc3, 0xa9, 0x6c, 0x69, 0x65)), as.raw(c(0x41, 0x6d, 0x65, 0x6c, 0x69, 0x61))), rawToChar, "") txt #[1] "Amélie" "Amelia" Encoding(txt) #[1] "unknown" "unknown" gsub(perl=TRUE, "(\\w)(\\w)", "<\\L\\1\\U\\2>", txt) #[1] "<a" "<a" gsub(perl=TRUE, "(\\w)(\\w)", "<\\L\\1\\U\\2>", txt[1]) #[1] "<a" gsub(perl=TRUE, "(\\w)(\\w)", "<\\L\\1\\U\\2>", txt[2]) #[1] "<aM><eL><iA>" I can change the Encoding to "latin1" or "UTF-8" and get similar results from gsub. Bill Dunlap TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 7:35 AM, Hugh Parsonage <hugh.parson...@gmail.com> wrote: > | Confirmed for R-devel (current) on Ubuntu 17.10. But ... isn't the > regexp > | you use wrong, ie isn't R-devel giving the correct answer? > > No, I don't think R-devel is correct (or at least consistent with the > documentation). My interpretation of gsub("(\\w)", "\\U\\1", entry, > perl = TRUE) is "Take every word character and replace it with itself, > converted to uppercase." > > Perhaps my example was too minimal. Consider the following: > > R> gsub("(\\w)", "\\U\\1", entry, perl = TRUE) > [1] "A" > > R> gsub("(\\w)", "\\1", entry, perl = TRUE) > [1] "author: Amélie" # OK, but very different to 'A', despite only > not specifying uppercase > > R> gsub("(\\w)", "\\U\\1", "author: Amelie", perl = TRUE) > [1] "AUTHOR: AMELIE" # OK, but very different to 'A', > > R> gsub("^(\\w+?): (\\w)", "\\U\\1\\E: \\2", entry, perl = TRUE) > "AUTHOR" # Where did everything after the first group go? > > I should note the following example too: > R> gsub("(\\w)", "\\U\\1", entry, perl = TRUE, useBytes = TRUE) > [1] "AUTHOR: AMéLIE" # latin1 encoding > > > A call to `readLines` (possibly `scan()` and `read.table` and friends) > is essential. > > > > > On 18 February 2018 at 02:15, Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org> wrote: > > > > On 17 February 2018 at 21:10, Hugh Parsonage wrote: > > | I was told to re-raise this issue with R-dev: > > | > > | In the documentation of R-dev and R-3.4.3, under ?gsub > > | > > | > replacement > > | > ... For perl = TRUE only, it can also contain "\U" or "\L" to > convert the rest of the replacement to upper or lower case and "\E" to end > case conversion. > > | > > | However, the following code runs differently: > > | > > | tempf <- tempfile() > > | writeLines(enc2utf8("author: Amélie"), con = tempf, useBytes = TRUE) > > | entry <- readLines(tempf, encoding = "UTF-8") > > | gsub("(\\w)", "\\U\\1", entry, perl = TRUE) > > | > > | > > | "AUTHOR: AMÉLIE" # R-3.4.3 > > | > > | "A" # R-dev > > > > Confirmed for R-devel (current) on Ubuntu 17.10. But ... isn't the > regexp > > you use wrong, ie isn't R-devel giving the correct answer? > > > > R> tempf <- tempfile() > > R> writeLines(enc2utf8("author: Amélie"), con = tempf, useBytes = TRUE) > > R> entry <- readLines(tempf, encoding = "UTF-8") > > R> gsub("(\\w)", "\\U\\1", entry, perl = TRUE) > > [1] "A" > > R> gsub("(\\w+)", "\\U\\1", entry, perl = TRUE) > > [1] "AUTHOR" > > R> gsub("(.*)", "\\U\\1", entry, perl = TRUE) > > [1] "AUTHOR: AMÉLIE" > > R> > > > > Dirk > > > > -- > > http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel