On 02/12/2017 9:23 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:

On 2 December 2017 at 08:38, Bill Denney wrote:
| Hi,
|
| I got a message last night that some of the tests in the PKNCA package do not follow 
best practices.  ("Do not test the exact format of R messages (from R itself or from 
other packages): They change, and they can be translated.")  Specifically, I test to 
ensure that an error is generated when a class cannot be coerced into a data.frame: 
https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_PKNCA.html
|
| I want to ensure that I'm getting an error that the variable cannot be 
coerced into a data.frame.
|
| What is the best practice to ensure that I'm getting a specific R error 
(about coercion) without testing the formatting of the error text?

To me this suggest testing the _condition_ triggering the error message, as
opposed to testing for the displayed text of the error message.

Isn't that what Bill suggested in the line below?

> | The only solution that immediately occurs to me is to wrap the coercion in a tryCatch and give my own error. But, then were the R error translated, the users of my package would lose the benefit of translation.

R does have a system for giving language-independent information about errors and warnings: see the ?signalCondition help page. Unfortunately, support for this at the C level is missing, so base functions generally don't use it. You only get something of class c("simpleError", "error", "condition").

I don't think there's anything better than Bill's solution, though I imagine it is possible to ask for translation of the message. For example, sqrt(-1) currently gives a warning with English message "NaNs produced".

I can ask to translate that into the current session language using

gettext("NaNs produced", domain = "R")

Figuring out the right thing for "domain" is likely a little painful: it depends on which package produced the message, and how.

I don't know if CRAN tests would complain if you tested for equality between a warning message and the result of gettext(): it's still true that if the English warning changed, the test would fail.

Duncan Murdoch

______________________________________________
R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel

Reply via email to