[R] Problem accessing help files

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 03/02/2010 7:17 PM, Jonathan wrote:
> Duncan:
>    I suspect that you're right about the file association having been the
> issue.  .html files were not associated with either browser.  However, I
> fixed that by associating .html files with Firefox, but R still gave me the
> same error!  If that was the problem, R didn't realize the association had
> been changed.
> 
> I tried uninstalling R and reinstalling R, thinking maybe it takes a
> snapshot of associations once (at install), and keeps its own internal table
> (even though that didn't sound all that intuitive).  No luck; R still
> persisted in being unable to open help files.

R knows nothing about the associations.  They are handled by the Windows 
shell functions.

And it's not .html files; Windows recognizes that the URL is a URL, and 
sends it to whichever browser has registered itself to handle them.

So you might fix things by deleting and re-installing Firefox, telling 
it to install itself as the default browser.  (Or tell IE to reinstall 
itself as the default, if you really want to do that.)

You can also set up a shortcut to a URL ("New shortcut" from the context 
menu on the desktop) and give it the URL that R tried.  This isn't a 
solution at all, since the URL only works for the current R session 
unless you set it to a fixed one with options(help.ports=12345), but it 
might give some more insight into what's wrong.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Then I rebooted my machine.  I'm still getting the same error.
> Any other ideas?
> 
> Thanks,
> Jon
> 
> On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> 
>> On 03/02/2010 5:14 PM, Jonathan wrote:
>>
>>> Rich:
>>>    Both IE and Firefox are unable to find the link you supplied.  However,
>>> that's only because I've restarted my R session since I pasted the error
>>> output (and it appears that each time I restart R, the URL is slightly
>>> different).  This time, I get:
>>>
>>> ?sum
>>> starting httpd help server ... done
>>> Error in shell.exec(url) :
>>>  access to 'http://127.0.0.1:31836/library/base/html/sum.html' denied
>>>  ---
>>> If I paste the new URL into either browser, I can read the entry without
>>> issue.  This is what I've been doing to read help entries, but it's
>>> tedious
>>> to copy and paste the URL into a browser every time I want to read the
>>> entry
>>> for a particular function..
>>>
>>> Happy to hear any other ideas!
>>>
>>>
>> What happens if you paste that into the "Run" box on the start menu?  It
>> looks to me as though the association between URLs and your browser is
>> broken.
>>
>> Another likely problem is antivirus software.  If you can temporarily turn
>> it off, see if that helps.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>