> According to its man page substring() "expands (its) arguments > cyclically to the length of the longest _provided_ none are of > zero length". > > So, as expected, I get an error here: > > > substring("abcd", first=2L, last=integer(0)) > Error in substring("abcd", first = 2L, last = integer(0)) : > invalid substring argument(s) > > But I don't get one here: > > > substring(character(0), first=1:2, last=3L) > character(0) > > which is unexpected.
If you want a set of string functions that strive to be simple and consistent you might want to look at the stringr package. And since it's a new package, I'm very keen to remove any inconsistencies. Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel