R help - Apr 2006 - Changing character limit in deparse, as.character and toString

Dear R-help Listers,

I am curious if there is some (hopefully easy) way to change the number of
characters that can be converted to a single string via any of deparse,
as.character or toString.   It seems that the limit is 500 for all of
these.  I saw a previous post where Prof. Ripley suggested that it was a
"trivial" change in the R internals to change as.character's limit
from 60
to 500, but I was hoping for something that didn't involve me trying to
alter the R internals.

Thanks for your help,
Dave.

--
Dave Armstrong
University of Maryland
Dept of Government and Politics
3140 Tydings Hall
College Park, MD 20742
Office: 2103L Cole Field House
Phone: 301-405-9735
e-mail: darmstrong@gvpt.umd.edu
web: www.davearmstrong-ps.com

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On Mon, 10 Apr 2006, Dave Armstrong wrote:
> Dear R-help Listers,
>
> I am curious if there is some (hopefully easy) way to change the number of
> characters that can be converted to a single string via any of deparse,
> as.character or toString.   It seems that the limit is 500 for all of
> these.
None of those functions convert 'characters' to a single string!
What actually are you trying to convert?

I guess the issue is the maximum line length in deparsing.  You can
almost always just paste multiple lines together, and this is done for 
formulae at several places in the R codebase.
> I saw a previous post where Prof. Ripley suggested that it was a
> "trivial" change in the R internals to change as.character's
limit from 60
> to 500, but I was hoping for something that didn't involve me trying to
> alter the R internals.
Please show respect other people's copyright, and quote exactly with a 
reference or not at all.  (I was unable to find what you are non-quoting, 
and don't even know if it is still relevant.)

> Dave Armstrong
> University of Maryland
> Dept of Government and Politics
> PLEASE do read the posting guide!
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595