[Rcpp-devel] Working with strings

[Romain Francois]

Le 17/11/12 15:22, Hadley Wickham a écrit :
> Hi all,
>
> Am I doing something wrong with the functions below, or has this
> behaviour not yet been implemented in Rcpp?
>
>      cppFunction('std::string first_char(const CharacterVector x) {
>        return x[0];
>      }')

Ah.

 >     cppFunction('std::string first_char(CharacterVector x) {
+       return x[0] ;
+     }')
filee454ce15417.cpp: In function ‘std::string 
first_char(Rcpp::CharacterVector)’:
filee454ce15417.cpp:7: error: conversion from 
‘Rcpp::internal::string_proxy<16>’ to non-scalar type ‘std::string’ 
requested


Because of the way character vectors are implemented, we had to use a 
proxy mechanism. so the result of the operator[] is a:

string_proxy<16>

	which has these two conversion operators:

		operator SEXP() const
			this just retrieves the underlying CHARSXP using STRING_ELT

		operator /*const */ char*() const
			this also applies CHAR() to it to get a C string.



I think we tried having an automatic conversion to std::string, but this 
failed and the compiler was confused.


Anyway. Short of automatic conversion, you can use a forced one:

     cppFunction('std::string first_char(const CharacterVector x) {
       return std::string( x[0] );
     }')

it works because of "only distance 1" conversion to go from string_proxy 
and something (in that case char*) the ctor of string will accept.


>      cppFunction('CharacterVector miss_c() {
>        return CharacterVector::create(NA_STRING);
>      }')

I've seen this too and was about to find my ways to a fix.

This works though:

cppFunction('CharacterVector miss_c() {
       CharacterVector out(1) ;
       out[0] = NA_STRING ;
       return out ;
     }')

Not as convenient. :-/



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Romain Francois
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