logical: extra pruning for -Ex.Rout files to
exclude the header.
nullPointers
logical: should the displayed addresses of
pointers be set to 0x00000000 before comparison?
Log
logical: should the returned value include a log of
differences found?
Value
If Log is true, a list with components status (see
below) and out, a character vector of descriptions of
differences, possibly of zero length.
Otherwise, a status indicator, 0L if and only if no differences
were found.
Details
The Rstartup banner and any timing information from R CMD
BATCH are removed from both files, together with lines about
loading packages. UTF-8 fancy quotes (see sQuote) and
on Windows, Windows' so-called smart quotes, are mapped to
a simple quote. Addresses of environments, compiled bytecode and
other exotic types expressed as hex addresses
(e.g., ) are mapped to
0x00000000. The files are then compared line-by-line. If
there are the same number of lines and useDiff is false, a
simple diff -b -like display of differences is printed
(which ignores trailing spaces and differences in numbers of
consecutive spaces), otherwise diff -bw is called on the
edited files. (This tries to ignore all differences in whitespace:
note that flag is not required by POSIX but is supported
by GNU, Solaris and FreeBSD versions.)
This can compare uncompressed PDF files, ignoring differences in
creation and modification dates.