R help - Nov 2012 - Parsing of the comment character when sourcing a file

In the course of producing some plots for a publication, I wanted to 
mark the places where double counting of cases had occurred. I used 
three symbols, ?*?, ?^? and ?#?. While these worked fine if the code was 
pasted into the R console, the ?#? (comment character) was recognized 
even when quoted if the code was read with ?source?, causing a silent 
error. Trying to escape the character didn?t work. This is mainly to 
alert those who try to use a comment character as a marker that it will 
work when the code is pasted, but not when the same code is sourced.

Jim

On 12-11-28 6:12 AM, Jim Lemon wrote:
> In the course of producing some plots for a publication, I wanted to
> mark the places where double counting of cases had occurred. I used
> three symbols, ?*?, ?^? and ?#?. While these worked fine if the code was
> pasted into the R console, the ?#? (comment character) was recognized
> even when quoted if the code was read with ?source?, causing a silent
> error. Trying to escape the character didn?t work. This is mainly to
> alert those who try to use a comment character as a marker that it will
> work when the code is pasted, but not when the same code is sourced.
>
It will work in both cases.  I suspect you have some other error in your 
code.

There are differences between source() and cut-and-paste, but this isn't 
one of them.  (The main difference I can think of is that source() will 
parse the whole file and will not run if there are
syntax errors, whereas cut-and-paste will execute things one at a time.)

Duncan Murdoch