R help - Feb 2013 - tidy.source() gets confused when # is not a comment but a part of a literal string?

I needed to clean someone else code and run it through tidy.source. It
encountered a number of hangups which after some experimentation lead me to
suspect that the culprit is # symbol when it is a part of literal string. For
example if i copy the following to the clipboard

confuse.tidy <- 
  function()
{
  txt <- 'abra # cadabra'
}

and run with default arguments
>tidy.source()
I am getting
Error in base::parse(text = text, srcfile = NULL) : 
  4:46: unexpected INCOMPLETE_STRING
4: txt <- 'abra  %InLiNe_IdEnTiFiEr% "# cadabra'"
5: }

However, good news, as i realized after a bit of struggle, is that i could do 
>tidy.source(keep.comment=F)
which produces desired 

confuse.tidy <- function() {
    txt <- "abra # cadabra"
}


Unfortunately, # is sometimes a legitimate part of strings, for example when you
grep through lines from a web page, or when you specify a color in a string with
#. So, I thought it'd be useful to point this out so that someone think of a
workaround for this as dropping comments  sometimes means dropping something
valuable.  
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Please scroll down to Section 7: https://github.com/yihui/formatR/wiki

And this has been reported at
https://github.com/yihui/formatR/issues/26 I'll try to fix it after R
3.0 is released.

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA


On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 8:19 PM, Andre Zege <azege at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> I needed to clean someone else code and run it through tidy.source. It
encountered a number of hangups which after some experimentation lead me to
suspect that the culprit is # symbol when it is a part of literal string. For
example if i copy the following to the clipboard
>
> confuse.tidy <-
>   function()
> {
>   txt <- 'abra # cadabra'
> }
>
> and run with default arguments
>
>>tidy.source()
>
> I am getting
> Error in base::parse(text = text, srcfile = NULL) :
>   4:46: unexpected INCOMPLETE_STRING
> 4: txt <- 'abra  %InLiNe_IdEnTiFiEr% "# cadabra'"
> 5: }
>
> However, good news, as i realized after a bit of struggle, is that i could
do
>
>>tidy.source(keep.comment=F)
>
> which produces desired
>
> confuse.tidy <- function() {
>     txt <- "abra # cadabra"
> }
>
>
> Unfortunately, # is sometimes a legitimate part of strings, for example
when you grep through lines from a web page, or when you specify a color in a
string with #. So, I thought it'd be useful to point this out so that
someone think of a workaround for this as dropping comments  sometimes means
dropping something valuable.
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
>
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