R help - Jan 2012 - cannot dyn.load dll from path

Hello,

I'm on Windows, and according to the documentation R searches along the 
search path when looking for dll's for dyn.load.

For illustration, I've copied the XML.dll from package XML in the C:/Temp 
folder

   if (file.exists("C:/Temp/XML.dll")) {
     Sys.setenv(path = paste("C:/Temp;", Sys.getenv("path"),
sep=""))
     dyn.load("XML.dll")   # doesn't find it!
   }


   head(strsplit(Sys.getenv("path"), ";")[[1]])  # C:/Temp
is there

   dyn.load("C:/Temp/XML.dll")  # works fine

Am I misreading the documentation?

Thank you,
Adrian
> sessionInfo()
R version 2.14.1 (2011-12-22)
Platform: i386-pc-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_United 
States.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
base
>

On 19/01/2012 11:19 AM, Adrian Dragulescu wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm on Windows, and according to the documentation R searches along the
> search path when looking for dll's for dyn.load.
>
> For illustration, I've copied the XML.dll from package XML in the
C:/Temp
> folder
>
>     if (file.exists("C:/Temp/XML.dll")) {
>       Sys.setenv(path = paste("C:/Temp;",
Sys.getenv("path"), sep=""))
>       dyn.load("XML.dll")   # doesn't find it!
>     }
>
>
>     head(strsplit(Sys.getenv("path"), ";")[[1]])  #
C:/Temp is there
>
>     dyn.load("C:/Temp/XML.dll")  # works fine
>
> Am I misreading the documentation?
I believe that search is done by Windows, and different versions are 
very inconsistent about search order.  However, one thing I would guess 
is that recent versions would require backslashes rather than forward 
slashes in PATH.  When R gets a path, it generally translates the 
slashes, but if you're relying on Windows to do it, you're stuck with 
what they decide to do.

Duncan Murdoch