On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 8:15 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wick...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 11:34 PM, Tomas Kalibera > <tomas.kalib...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On 05/03/2018 11:14 PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote: >>> >>> Also, as mentioned in my >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2012-August/064739.html, when >>> not specifying the mode argument, the default on Windows is mode = "w" >>> *except* for certain, case-sensitive, filename extensions: >>> >>> if(missing(mode) && length(grep("\\.(gz|bz2|xz|tgz|zip|rda|RData)$", >>> url))) >>> mode <- "wb" >>> >>> Just like the need for mode = "wb" on Windows, the above >>> special-file-extension-hack is only happening on Windows, and is only >>> documented in ?download.file if you're on Windows; so someone who's on >>> Linux/macOS trying to help someone on Windows may not be aware of >>> this. This adds to even more confusions, e.g. "works for me". >> >> If we were designing the API today, it would probably make more sense not to >> convert any line endings by default. Today's editors _usually_ can cope with >> different line endings and it is probably easier to detect that a text file >> has incorrect line endings rather than detecting that a binary file has been >> corrupted by an attempt to convert line endings. But whether to change >> existing, documented behavior is a different question. In order to help >> users and programmers who do not read the documentation carefully we would >> create problems for users and programmers who do. The current heuristic/hack >> is in line with the compatibility approach: it detects files that are >> obviously binary, so it changes the default behavior only for cases when it >> would obviously cause damage. > > From a purely utilitarian standpoint, there are far more users who do > not carefully read the documentation than users who do ;) > > (I'd also argue that basing the decision on the file extension is > suboptimal, and it would be better to use the mime type if provided by > the server)
Also note that MS just announced support for unix line endings in notepad https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/05/08/extended-eol-in-notepad/ Hadley -- http://hadley.nz ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel