R help - Jun 2009 - problem with scan recognizing newline '\n'

I'm using R to do some file processing in Linux and am trying to read
in the output of find . -type f -print >
~/Music_Archives_search_problem/ls.output.find.txt

This command yields a text file with each line representing the full
path name of all files in the directory and subdirs. Unfortunately,
there seem to be some special characters that interfere with scan
recognizing '\n' as newline. At least that's what I assume the
problem
is, but I can't identify which those might be or how to correct the
problem. Below is my code and the problem output followed by
sessionInfo(). This is executed in a loop, with i starting from zero.
I also tried with 'allowEscapes = TRUE', but that made no difference.
As you can see, the first FLAC file is followed by a '\n', which is
ignored. This seems to happen about once in every 20 file names, so it
does work properly most of the time. Also, when the file is opened in
emacs, the newlines are recognized.

current.line <-
scan("~/Music_Archives_search_problem/ls.output.find.txt",
                       skip = i, nlines = 1, what = 'character', sep
"@", allowEscapes = FALSE)

[1] "./Christian/Christian Gospel/Chanticleer/Chanticleer - How Sweet
the Sound; Spirituals & Traditional Gosp - 04 - Soon One Mornin
Medley; Soon One Mornin-What You Gon Do When the
....flac\n./Christian/Christian Gospel/Chanticleer/Chanticleer - How
Sweet the Sound; Spirituals & Traditional Gosp - 05 - Didnt It
Rain.flac"
> sessionInfo()
R version 2.9.0 (2009-04-17)
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

locale:
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8;LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8;LC_MONETARY=C;LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8;LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices datasets  utils     methods   base
------------------------------------------------------------
Mark W. Kimpel MD  ** Neuroinformatics ** Dept. of Psychiatry
Indiana University School of Medicine

15032 Hunter Court, Westfield, IN  46074

(317) 490-5129 Work, & Mobile & VoiceMail
(317) 399-1219  Home
Skype:  mkimpel

"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."
-- B. F. Skinner

Mark Kimpel wrote:
> I'm using R to do some file processing in Linux and am trying to read
> in the output of find . -type f -print >
> ~/Music_Archives_search_problem/ls.output.find.txt
> 
> This command yields a text file with each line representing the full
> path name of all files in the directory and subdirs. Unfortunately,
> there seem to be some special characters that interfere with scan
> recognizing '\n' as newline. At least that's what I assume the
problem
> is, but I can't identify which those might be or how to correct the
> problem. Below is my code and the problem output followed by
> sessionInfo(). This is executed in a loop, with i starting from zero.
> I also tried with 'allowEscapes = TRUE', but that made no
difference.
> As you can see, the first FLAC file is followed by a '\n', which is
> ignored. This seems to happen about once in every 20 file names, so it
> does work properly most of the time. Also, when the file is opened in
> emacs, the newlines are recognized.
> 
> current.line <-
scan("~/Music_Archives_search_problem/ls.output.find.txt",
>                        skip = i, nlines = 1, what = 'character',
sep > "@", allowEscapes = FALSE)
> 
> [1] "./Christian/Christian Gospel/Chanticleer/Chanticleer - How Sweet
> the Sound; Spirituals & Traditional Gosp - 04 - Soon One Mornin
> Medley; Soon One Mornin-What You Gon Do When the
> ....flac\n./Christian/Christian Gospel/Chanticleer/Chanticleer - How
> Sweet the Sound; Spirituals & Traditional Gosp - 05 - Didnt It
> Rain.flac"
>
Hmm, do those songs have apostrophes in the title? Check the quoteargument.

(Is the sep="@" actually doing anything? Otherwise readLines() would
be
more to the point...)

-pd

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