More specificity: how long is the string, what is the pattern you are matching against? It sounds like you might have a complex pattern that in trying to match the string might be doing a lot of back tracking and such. There is an O'Reilly book on Mastering Regular Expression that might help you understand what might be happening. So if you can provide a better example than just the error message, it would be helpful.
On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 1:11 PM, Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.ise...@gmail.com> wrote: > Dear All, > I am experiencing some problems with a script of mine. > It crashes with this message > > Error in grepl(fut_string, past_string) : > invalid regular expression > '12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12653a6#12 > Calls: entropy_estimate_hash -> total_entropy_lz -> entropy_lz -> grepl > In addition: Warning message: > In grepl(fut_string, past_string) : regcomp error: 'Out of memory' > Execution halted > > To make a long story short, I use some functions which eventually call grepl > on very long strings to check whether a certain substring is part of a > longer string. > Now, the script technically works (it never crashes when I run it on a > smaller dataset) and the problem does not seem to be RAM memory (I have > several GB of RAM on my machine and its consumption never shoots up so my > machine never resorts to swap memory). > So (though I am not an expert) it looks like the problem is some limitation > of grepl or R memory management. > Any idea about how I could tackle this problem or how I can profile my code > to fix it (though it really seems to me that I have to find a way to allow R > to process longer strings). > Any suggestion is appreciated. > Cheers > > Lorenzo > > ______________________________________________ > 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. > -- Jim Holtman Cincinnati, OH +1 513 646 9390 What is the problem that you are trying to solve? ______________________________________________ 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.