R devel - Mar 2006 - request to add "..." to cat(ngettext in "warnings" function

Madams & Sirs,
  I am working on porting some R code to one of our servers to run under web or
crontab direction.  With that in mind I have been working on directing
informative, warning, and error messages to outputs as I require.  I would like
to suggest a change to the "warnings" function; that the passed
arguments be enabled to all instances of "cat" in the function,
specifically that the "cat(ngettext" have the ellipsis added to the
call so that users may be able to call warnings as
"warnings(file=stderr())" and the function will write all text to the
stderr stream.  As it is written today, the text "Warning message:" is
written to the console output no matter what.  Since I am writing only output to
the console output which is to be passed to the calling script (PHP, shell
script, etc.) I need to divert all other messages to the stderr which I log
using sink, so I need all of warnings' output to go to stderr.

Thank you.


warnings<-function (...) 
{
    if (!exists("last.warning", envir = .GlobalEnv)) 
        return()
    last.warning <- get("last.warning", envir = .GlobalEnv)
    if (!(n <- length(last.warning))) 
        return()
    names <- names(last.warning)
    cat(ngettext(n, "Warning message:\n", "Warning
messages:\n"),...)
    for (i in 1:n) {
        out <- if (n == 1) 
            names[i]
        else paste(i, ": ", names[i], sep = "")
        if (length(last.warning[[i]])) {
            temp <- deparse(last.warning[[i]])
            out <- paste(out, "in:", temp[1], if (length(temp) >
                1) 
                " ...")
        }
        cat(out, ..., fill = TRUE)
    }
}




Leif Kirschenbaum
Senior Yield Engineer
Reflectivity, Inc.
(408) 737-8100 x307
leif at reflectivity.com