[Rd] % symbol in .Rd files?

[Dominick Samperi]

Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>> "Dominick" == Dominick Samperi <dsamperi at decisionsynergy.com>
>>>>>>     on Mon, 24 Jul 2006 13:07:29 -0400 writes:
>>>>>>             
>
>     Dominick> Hello, I am encountering problems when there is a
>     Dominick> '%' character in package .Rd files. More
>     Dominick> precisely, CRAN is having problems with these
>     Dominick> characters when running check, whereas I am not
>     Dominick> seeing any problems under Linux and Windows.  I
>     Dominick> did see these problems, and found that escaping
>     Dominick> the %'s fixes the problem in my testing, but
>     Dominick> apparently this does not fix the problem when
>     Dominick> check is run at CRAN.
>
>     Dominick> I suspect that there are some compatibility
>     Dominick> problems between shells, TeX, or perl versions, or
>     Dominick> perhaps the check on CRAN goes through more levels
>     Dominick> of preprocessing?
>
>     Dominick> I can probably fix this problem by removing all
>     Dominick> '%' chars from my .Rd files, but this doesn't seem
>     Dominick> like a very natural solution.
>
> definitely not.  Other packages have them as well,
> without giving any CRAN hickups
>
> No, you should find and fix the problem.
>
>     Dominick> Any ideas?
>
> We need examples which -- at least for you -- produce the
> problem.  You could post a small tar file (mime-types 'application/x-tar'
> or 'application/x-compressed-tar' are accepted for R-devel) if
> you want.
>
> Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich
>
>   
An example of the '% problem' is provided by the RcppExample.Rd file that
is part of the RcppTemplate package (V4.2). There you will find:

# Note that we need to escape the percent sign here...
datestr <- c('2006-6-10', '2006-7-12', '2006-8-10')
datevec <- as.Date(datestr, "\%Y-\%m-\%d") # date vector

Without the escaped '%' signs I get an obscure error message when
I run:
 > example(RcppExample)

Here is the error message:
Error in parse(file, n = -1, NULL, "?") : syntax error at
36:
 
37:
 >

There was another problem with this package (now fixed) that
was showing up on CRAN, but not in my testing. This was due to
the fact that the latest version of r-devel includes some new
type checking, so an error was caught at CRAN, but not in
my testing (I use the standard version of R). This problem was
unrelated to the '% problem'.


ds