[Rd] two help problems in R-2.0.0 for Windows (PR#7269)

ligges@statistik.uni-dortmund.de
2004-10-07T19:33:03Z

R-2.0.0, WinNT / WinXP:

  options(chmhelp=TRUE)
  ?dnorm  # does not work!
  ?Normal # works!

Looks like calling compiled html help does not work for aliases, but
only for the title of help pages...

And a quick fix without changing the design is to change lines
136-137 in .../src/library/utils/R/help.R as follows:

-    err <- .C("Rchtml", hlpfile, topic,
-        err = integer(1), PACKAGE = "")$err

+    err <- .C("Rchtml", hlpfile, rev(strsplit(file,
"/")[[1]])[1],
+        err = integer(1), PACKAGE = "")$err

but I think it is a problem by design and the name of the help pages
should be returned by help() as well (not only implicitly).





Well, for htmlhelp, there is another error. The browser (e.g. Mozilla
1.7.3) tries to open "T:\R\library\stats\html/Normal.html" and has
problems with different kinds of slashes (/ vs. \).

  options(chmhelp=FALSE, htmlhelp=TRUE)
  ?dnorm  # does not work!


This can be fixed by changing line 4 in
.../src/library/utils/R/windows/help.R
as follows:

-    browseURL(file)
+    browseURL(chartr("/", "\\", file))




AArrrrrgh, I've never used non-text help pages in the developer releases
... and obviously nobody else ...

Uwe Ligges