[R] bug in paste?

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

Ott Toomet <siim at obs.ee> writes:

> Dear all,
> 
> I have strange problems with paste.  Actually I suggest it is a bug (I
> send a associated bug report for some days ago too).

(And a whopping big one too...)

> I have a vector ce0, a character vector m and I paste them together:
> 
> > ce0
>  [1] "1985" "9"    "2"    "2"    "1"    "A"    "1"    ""     "NA"   "5"
> [11] "1999"
> 
> > m
>  [1] "<1>" "<2>" "<3>" "<4>" "<4>" "<6>" "<7>" "<8>" "<9>" "<0>" "END"
> 
> > paste( ce0, m, sep="", collapse="")
> [1] "1985<1>9<2>2<3>2<4>1<4>A1<7>NA<9>5<0>1999END"
> 
>                             ^
> I expected to get the components of m-vector lying cleanly ordered
> between the components of ce0, but it isn't so.  Instead of "1 2 3 4 5
> 6 7 8 9 0 END" you can see "1 2 3 4 4   7 9 0 END".  The main problem
> rises from the "A1" in the row (marked with ^), where there is no
> component from m inbetween the ce0 values at all!

I don't think the problem is sitting in paste():

> ce0<-c("1985","9","2","2","1","A","1","","NA","5","1999")
> m <- c("<1>","<2>","<3>","<4>","<4>","<6>","<7>","<8>","<9>","<0>","END")
> paste( ce0, m, sep="", collapse="")
[1] "1985<1>9<2>2<3>2<4>1<4>A<6>1<7><8>NA<9>5<0>1999END"


> However, this needs some background information.  ce0 is originally
> from a large dataset (7000 obs x 1200 vars), read from a stata7-file
> using read.dta:
> > ce0 <- read.dta( "file.dta")[1,230:240]
> So I am afraid ce0 contains some kind of extra iformation which I was
> not able to figure about.

What happens if you do a dput() on the vectors?

It might be that reading that big file is causing an overflow
somewhere, leading to a corrupted workspace -- i.e. that the bug is
really in the foreign package.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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