[Rd] filenames with special characters in the R/ directory of a package?

Barry Rowlingson b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk
Fri Feb 12 09:36:39 CET 2010


On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 5:35 AM, blue sky <bluesky315 at gmail.com> wrote:
> According to R-exts.pdf (page 3):
> For maximal portability filenames should only
> contain only ASCII characters not excluded already (that is
> A-Za-z0-9._!#$%&+,;=@^(){}’[]
>
> I have some files with special characters like '[' and '%' e.g.
> '[.set.R'.

That character list in your extract from R-exts.pdf is a list of
non-special characters. And [ and % are in there.

 It's clarification of three sentences previous, which says:

"the characters ‘"’, ‘*’, ‘:’, ‘/’, ‘<’, ‘>’, ‘?’, ‘\’, and ‘|’ are
not allowed in file names"

> I also have some functions that also have those special
> characters defined in those files exported in NAMESPACE.
>
> I use the following command to install. And I get no warning or errors.
>
> R CMD INSTALL -d -l my_custom_dir my.pkg
>
> I then load the package. I get the following errors and warnings. I
> changed a file to one without these special characters. Then the
> corresponding warning/error disappears. Is it the case that there
> should never be files with special characters as names?
>
>> library(my.pkg)
> Error in namespaceExport(ns, exports) :
>  undefined exports: %is%
> In addition: Warning message:
> S3 methods ‘[.set’ were declared in NAMESPACE but not found
> Error: package/namespace load failed for 'my.pkg'

 Have you done an R CMD check on your package? I suspect a problem in
your NAMESPACE file, but it's not related to "special characters".

Barry



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