[R] cat(), Rgui, and support for carriage return \r...

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 3/28/2006 11:00 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> Rgui now supports \r in the same way as rterm.

I notice that there's a slight change to the colour scheme:  now the 
prompt ">" is in foreground colour, rather than user colour.  This might 
make sense (it's printed by the system, after all), but it looks a 
little strange at first.

Duncan Murdoch


> 
> On Sun, 19 Mar 2006, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> 
>> On 3/18/2006 2:39 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>>> On 3/17/2006 9:44 AM, Jeffrey Racine wrote:
>>>> Hi, and thanks in advance for your time.
>>>>
>>>> Background - I am working on a package and wish to have a routine's
>>>> progress reported. The routine can take some time, and I would like to
>>>> inform the user about the routine's progress. I have scoured the
>>>> archives but to no avail, so would like to solicit input from this list.
>>>>
>>>> I am successfully using
>>>>
>>>> cat("\rBootstrap replication ", i, " of ", boot.num,)
>>>> flush.console() # To flush stdout on windows systems
>>>>
>>>> which works as expected on *NIX systems and using Rterm under windows.
>>>> However, under Rgui the carriage return \r is ignored, and I certainly
>>>> don't want to use the newline escape sequence \n. Under Rgui it appears
>>>> as
>>>>
>>>> Bootstrap replication 1 of 399Bootstrap replication 2 of 399Bootstrap...
>>>>
>>>> but I want it to function properly if at all possible.
>>>>
>>>> My question is simply whether there is a portable way to implement this
>>>> so that it works regardless of the R platform the user may be working
>>>> on?
>>>>
>>>> Many thanks for any/all suggestions.
>>> I've just been looking at the source code for this.  I think it will be
>>> relatively easy to make \r in Rgui do a destructive CR (i.e. it will
>>> return to the start of the line, but clear any existing characters).
>>> I'll play around a bit and then do that for R-devel.
>> Oops, this was a bad idea.  I did commit the change for a while, but
>> have reverted it now.
>>
>> It seems that the help system displays help pages by writing CR LF at
>> the end of each line; the CR is \r, and my change above caused it to
>> wipe out the line it had just written.  The help pages ended up
>> completely blank.
>>
>> I may look into supporting \r as a non-destructive CR, but that's
>> harder, because it means low-level changes to the console display.
>> Right now it only writes to the end of the text buffer; this would mean
>> it would sometimes write to a spot before the end.  I don't think it
>> would be impossible to do, but it will take more time than I have right now.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
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>