[R] Wide character in print?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Note that this is a Perl message (nothing to do with R), as the 
message from gdata says pretty clearly.

Ask the gdata maintainer (see our posting guide) or on a Perl forum. 
There are less restricted ways to read .xls files in R: XLConnect can 
read this file, for example.

On Sun, 3 Feb 2013, Spencer Graves wrote:

> Hello:
>
>
>      I get "Wide character in print" from trying read.xls("22_data.xls") in 
> the gdata package, with "22_data.xls" downloaded from 
> "Varieties_Country_A-E.xls" at 
> "http://www.reinhartandrogoff.com/data/browse-by-topic/topics/7/":
>
>
>> library(gdata)
>> read.xls("22_data.xls")
> Wide character in print at 
> C:/Users/sgraves/pgms/R/R-2.15.2/library/gdata/perl/xls2csv.pl line 270.
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.15.2 (2012-10-26)
> Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
>
> locale:
> [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
> [2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
> [3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
> [4] LC_NUMERIC=C
> [5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods base
>
> other attached packages:
> [1] gdata_2.12.0
>
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
> [1] gtools_2.7.0
>
>
>      I get the same message from xls2sep("22_data.xls").
>
>
>      It's only a comment, so I suppose I could ignore it.  However, it's 
> generated by a function I'm adding to the Ecdat package, and I'd rather find 
> a way to avoid it.  (I suppose I could dump it to sink, but that's pretty 
> extreme and could mask other problems.)
>
>
>      Thanks,
>      Spencer
>
>
> -- 
> Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
> President and Chief Technology Officer
> Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
> 751 Emerson Ct.
> San José, CA 95126
> ph:  408-655-4567
> web:  www.structuremonitoring.com
>
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>

-- 
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