[Rd] segfault in browseURL()

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, Jeff Gentry wrote:

> > With what settings of argument `browser'?
> 
> In this case, none.
> 
> getOption("browser") returns NULL.  When browseURL() is working form e
> under that configuration it pulls up IE5
> 
> > If you absolutely must have such long URLs, try specifying a browser 
> > (although you will probably find limits that way too).
> 
> When I tried specifying 'browser="explorer"', I still get errors, although
> not segfaults.  The error seems to be dependent on exactly what the URL
> string is, and is always fairly odd (as if Windows is pushing the extra
> bits off into other commands).
> 
> > As the FAQ asks, we do need a reproducible example to check the fixes.
> 
> Well, the toy example I was using to first verify that it was coming from
> browseURL in general was just to do this:
> z <- rep("z", 300)
> z <- paste(z, collapse="")
> browseURL(z)
> 
> While that URL obviously won't work, note that if you make it of a smaller
> length that instead of a segfault you should just get the error that the
> URL doesn't seem to exist.

That's not a URL at all, and I get nothing (as I should). If I put http:// 
in front it works (as a search item).

> The other example I was using (a 'real' example) requires the use of the
> annotate and hgu95av2 packages from Bioconductor (and was supplied by
> James MacDonald):
> 
> library(annotate)
> data(eset)
> gn <- geneNames(eset)[453]
> gn <- getPMID(gn,"hgu95av2")
> gn <- unlist(gn, use.names=FALSE)
> pubmed(gn, disp="browser")
> 
> This builds up a URL query and then calls 'browseURL(query)'.

And you could extract `query' and tell us what that is ....

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595