The OP's error suggests (to me) that there's a line break error somewhere so it may be a funny quirk of encoding/OS incompatibility if it's from a source()'d script.
Incidentally, the OP could also write the body of his function as a one liner with: seq_along(a) - a Michael On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 4:33 PM, Sarah Goslee <sarah.gos...@gmail.com> wrote: > I think you'll need to provide a reproducible example, because your > code works for me: > >> fsubt <- function(a) { > + b <- 1:length(a) > + b-a > + } >> >> >> fsubt(1:5) > [1] 0 0 0 0 0 >> >> fsubt(sample(1:10)) > [1] -8 -6 1 1 -1 5 3 1 4 0 >> >> fsubt(2) > [1] -1 > > > On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 4:01 PM, Schryver, Jack C. <schryve...@ornl.gov> > wrote: >> Hi, >> >> Although the following statements work individually in R, they produce an >> error if placed inside a function as below: >> >> fsubt <- function(a) { >> b <- 1:length(a) >> b-a >> } >> >> The error message is: >> >> Error: unexpected input in: >> "b <- 1:length(a) >> b-" >> >> Any insight would be greatly appreciated. >> >> Thanks, >> Jack > > -- > Sarah Goslee > http://www.functionaldiversity.org > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.