On Fri, 15 Jan 2010, Don MacQueen wrote:
Here's an example (session info at the end).
tmpv <- c('\265g/L','Bq/L')
order(tmpv)
[1] 2 1
tmpv <- I(tmpv)
order(tmpv)
Error in if (xi > xj) 1L else -1L : missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed
foov <- gsub('\265','',tmpv)
order(foov)
[1] 2 1
str(tmpv)
Class 'AsIs' chr [1:2] "\265g/L" "Bq/L"
str(foov)
Class 'AsIs' chr [1:2] "g/L" "Bq/L"
I can easily work around this in my scripts, but shouldn't order() succeed
with such an object?
Not in the C locale. There is no pre-defined ordering for non-ASCII
characters in that locale and the string is invalid in a strict C
locale.
(I suppose this could be Mac-specific, but I'm assuming it's not...)
No, but the handling of invalid strings in C is OS-specific.
For context:
The character "\265" causes the Greek letter mu to be displayed in various
output devices. For example, the character vector eventually gets written to
an html file, which when displayed in Firefox (Mac) is displayed as Greek mu.
Also in Excel 2004 (Mac).
I first wrote these scripts 6 years ago, when "\265" was a way I could find
to display the Greek mu in output text files of various kinds. They worked as
recently as 3 months ago. Maybe there's a better way now to display a mu in
text-based contexts?
Use UTF-8 and Unicode \u03BC
(http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/greek.html).
The issue is that you need a xtfrm method for 'AsIs': it falls back to
comparisons via .gt and those (correctly) fail.
xtfrm.AsIs <- function(x) xtfrm(unclass(x))
would keep get you going until you fix the scripts.
sessionInfo()
R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14)
i386-apple-darwin8.11.1
locale:
[1] C
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
Thanks
-Don
--
--------------------------------------
Don MacQueen
Environmental Protection Department
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, CA, USA
925-423-1062
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--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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