On 09/12/2011 14:49, Jannis wrote:
Thanks to all who replied. perl = TRUE indeed seems to fix the problem. It 
would be great, however, to prevent others from stumbling in this pitfall by 
fixing the issue if this is possible. But as Prof. Ripley mentioned fixing this 
might be difficult/impossible so we might have to live with it.


By the way, is there an easily accessible and search able list of such bugs for 
R (just for the future)?

http://www.bugs.r-project.org

I'm not sure how obvious it would be that it is the same problem. I happened to have worked on trying to solve it.


Thanks a lot
Jannis



----- Ursprüngliche Message -----
Von: Sarah Goslee<sarah.gos...@gmail.com>
An: Duncan Murdoch<murdoch.dun...@gmail.com>
Cc: Jannis<bt_jan...@yahoo.de>; "r-help@r-project.org"<r-help@r-project.org>
Gesendet: 15:37 Freitag, 9.Dezember 2011
Betreff: Re: [R] unexpected behaviour of sub() / usage of regexp

But I do get the incorrect result on R 2.14.0 on linux:
sub('[[:digit:]]{1,2}', '', '9ewww')
[1] "www"

And also:

sub('[[:digit:]]{1,2}', '', '9ewww')
[1] "www"
sub('[[:digit:]]{1,2}', '', 'ewww9')
[1] "ww9"
sub('\\d{1,2}', '', 'ewww9')
[1] "ww9"

But:
sub('\\d', '', 'ewww9')
[1] "ewww"
sub('\\d*', '', '9ewww')
[1] "ewww"

So it seems to be something about the way the curly braces are
handled, but only with certain groups:

sub('e{1,2}', '', '9ewww')
[1] "9www"
sub('9{1,2}', '', '9ewww')
[1] "ewww"


But, as Prof. Ripley's email suggests, perl=TRUE solves the problem.
(I was trying out various combinations when it appeared in my inbox.)

sessionInfo()
R version 2.14.0 (2011-10-31)
Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
[3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
[5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=C                 LC_NAME=C
[9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base



On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Duncan Murdoch<murdoch.dun...@gmail.com>  wrote:
On 09/12/2011 9:20 AM, Jannis wrote:

Dear R users,


the way I understand the documentation of sub() and regexp the following
code:



sub('[[:digit:]]{1,2}', '', '9ewww')



... should yield:

'ewww'


It returns, however:

'www'


Why is this the case? My code should just substitute 1 (minimum) or up to
2 (maximum) digits, i.e. numbers and not the 'e' in the string. Do I
misinterpret something here?


I get your expected output of "ewww" running 2.14.0 or 2.14.0-patched on
Windows.   So it's not a universal problem...

Duncan Murdoch


Thanks for any ideas
Jannis


  sessionInfo()
R version 2.14.0 (2011-10-31)
Platform: i686-pc-linux-gnu (32-bit)

locale:
  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C                [3]
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8      [5]
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8     [7] LC_PAPER=C
           LC_NAME=C                   [9] LC_ADDRESS=C
LC_TELEPHONE=C            [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base




--
Brian D. Ripley,                  rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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