The Art of R Programming

Use of String Utilities in the edtdbg Debugging Tool

The internal code of the edtdbg debugging tool, which will be discussed in Section 13.4, makes heavy use of string utilities. A typical example of such usage is the dgbsendeditcmd() function:

# send command to editor
dbgsendeditcmd <- function(cmd) {
   syscmd <- paste("vim --remote-send ",cmd," --servername ",vimserver,sep="")
   system(syscmd)
}

What is going on here? The main point is that edtdbg sends remote commands to the Vim text editor. For instance, if you are running Vim with a server name of 168 and you want the cursor in Vim to move to line 12, you could type this into a terminal (shell) window:

vim --remote-send 12G --servername 168

The effect would be the same as if you had physically ...