On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 11:34 PM, Tomas Kalibera <tomas.kalib...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 05/03/2018 11:14 PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote: >> >> Also, as mentioned in my >> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2012-August/064739.html, when >> not specifying the mode argument, the default on Windows is mode = "w" >> *except* for certain, case-sensitive, filename extensions: >> >> if(missing(mode) && length(grep("\\.(gz|bz2|xz|tgz|zip|rda|RData)$", >> url))) >> mode <- "wb" >> >> Just like the need for mode = "wb" on Windows, the above >> special-file-extension-hack is only happening on Windows, and is only >> documented in ?download.file if you're on Windows; so someone who's on >> Linux/macOS trying to help someone on Windows may not be aware of >> this. This adds to even more confusions, e.g. "works for me". > > If we were designing the API today, it would probably make more sense not to > convert any line endings by default. Today's editors _usually_ can cope with > different line endings and it is probably easier to detect that a text file > has incorrect line endings rather than detecting that a binary file has been > corrupted by an attempt to convert line endings. But whether to change > existing, documented behavior is a different question. In order to help > users and programmers who do not read the documentation carefully we would > create problems for users and programmers who do. The current heuristic/hack > is in line with the compatibility approach: it detects files that are > obviously binary, so it changes the default behavior only for cases when it > would obviously cause damage.
>From a purely utilitarian standpoint, there are far more users who do not carefully read the documentation than users who do ;) (I'd also argue that basing the decision on the file extension is suboptimal, and it would be better to use the mime type if provided by the server) Hadley -- http://hadley.nz ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
