Thank you for your responses. You helped me to see something right in front of me that I should have noticed quickly. I copy/pasted my script from MS Word instead of using a safer text editor. I did catch the funky double-quotes the MS Word uses, but I think it also sometimes substitutes a dash for a minus sign.
Jack -----Original Message----- From: ted@deb [mailto:ted@deb] On Behalf Of Ted Harding Sent: Monday, March 19, 2012 4:56 PM To: r-help@r-project.org Cc: Schryver, Jack C.; Schryver, Jack C.; Sarah Goslee Subject: Re: [R] Unexpected input in function I think the most likely explanation is that something in the input string has had the effect of inserting an invisible "character" between the "-" and the "a" in "b-a", and a possible suspect is pollution by UTF8: see the discussion at http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/unexpected-input-in-rpart-td3168363.html Or a character "copy&paste"d from an editor that uses a non-ASCII encoding for its characters. See e.g.: http://support.rstudio.org/help/discussions/problems/ 386-error-unexpected-input-in and: http://www.mail-archive.com/r-help@r-project.org/msg71798.html On 19-Mar-2012 Sarah Goslee wrote: > I think you'll need to provide a reproducible example, because your > code works for me: > >> fsubt <- function(a) { > + b <- 1:length(a) > + b-a > + } >> >> >> fsubt(1:5) > [1] 0 0 0 0 0 >> >> fsubt(sample(1:10)) > [1] -8 -6 1 1 -1 5 3 1 4 0 >> >> fsubt(2) > [1] -1 > > > On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 4:01 PM, Schryver, Jack C. <schryve...@ornl.gov> > wrote: >> Hi, >> >> Although the following statements work individually in R, they produce an >> error if placed inside a function as below: >> >> fsubt <- function(a) { >> b <- 1:length(a) >> b-a >> } >> >> The error message is: >> >> Error: unexpected input in: >> "b <- 1:length(a) >> b-" >> >> Any insight would be greatly appreciated. >> >> Thanks, >> Jack > > -- > Sarah Goslee > http://www.functionaldiversity.org ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.hard...@wlandres.net> Date: 19-Mar-2012 Time: 20:56:04 This message was sent by XFMail ______________________________________________ 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.