On Monday, July 29, 2013 07:47:34 AM MacQueen, Don wrote: > A recent version of the R extension manual says, > > "For maximal portability, the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file should be written > entirely in ASCII — if this is not possible it must contain an ‘Encoding’ > field (see below)." > > It also says, regarding the DESCRIPTION file, > > "Fields start with an ASCII name immediately followed by a colon: the > value starts after the colon and a space." That, plus the fact that all the other files were in plain ASCII, convinced me to recode DESCRIPTION to ASCII. Which solved the problem.
I guess, at least in this context, ASCII is considered an encoding as well as a character set. Thanks. Ross P.S. For the record, I used recode on linux to do the conversion; iconv is another utility that would probably work. > > >A DESCRIPTION file begins with 0xFFFE and > >$ file DESCRIPTION > >DESCRIPTION: Little-endian UTF-16 Unicode text, with CRLF, CR line > >terminators > > > >I think it was created on Windows. > > > >In R (2,15,1 on Debian GNU/Linux), using roxygen2, I get > > > >> roxygenize("../GitHub/mice") > > > >Error: Line starting '��P ...' is malformed! > > > >Enter a frame number, or 0 to exit > > > >1: roxygenize("../GitHub/mice") > >2: read.description(DESCRIPTION) > >3: read.dcf(file) > > > >Selection: 3 > >Called from: read.description(DESCRIPTION) > >Browse[1]> Q > > > >I'm not sure if the first 2 characters after line starting ', which are > >octal > >377, 376, will survive email; I stripped them out of the subject line. > > > >The files (DESCRIPTION isn't the only one) have also caused trouble for > >git > >(even on Windows 7), since it thinks they are binary. > > > >Any advice about what to do? > > > >I'm reluctant to change the format of the files because it's not my > >package. > > > >Ross Boylan > > > >______________________________________________ > >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.