[ESS] elisp problems (was Re: feature request: look more places for R on windows [code])

[Rmh]

try using w32-shortname ( or something similar, i am not at my machine to check the right spelling).
that gives the 8.3 name ( which is unfortunately machine dependent)

Rich

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 18, 2013, at 15:12, Ross Boylan <ross at biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:

> I tried using my macro on an XP machine and it didn't work.  There were 2 problems, one of which I need help solving.
> 
> On 3/28/2013 1:51 PM, Ross Boylan wrote:
>> (defun installPath-reg-read (regpath)
>>  ;read a path in the Windows registry. This probably works for string
>>  ;values only. If the path does not exist, it returns nil.
>>  ;Adapted from source:
>> ;http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7436530/can-i-read-the-windows-registry-from-within-elisp-how 
>>  (let ((reg.exe (concat (getenv "windir") "\\system32\\reg.exe"))
>>        tokens last-token)
>> 
>>    (setq reg-value (shell-command-to-string (concat reg.exe " query " regpath " /v InstallPath"))
>>          tokens (split-string reg-value nil t)
>>          last-token (nth (1- (length tokens)) tokens))
>> 
>>    (and (not (string= last-token "value.")) last-token)))
> The first problem is that on XP failure to find a value produces a string ending in "value" without a period.  I added a test for that.
> 
> The second problem, which is not XP-specific, is that last-token is not the right value if there are spaces in the path.
> I tried extracting everything after REG_SZ, but I keep getting the whitespace before the string I'm interested in.  Sample attempt
> (string-match "^.*REG_SZ *\\([^ ].*\\) *" tlong)
> (match-string 1 tlong)
> where tlong is my temporary variable corresponding to reg-value above.  I've also tried [:space:].
> I either fail to match or get a match that includes a bunch of leading white-space, perhaps a tab.
> 
> Any suggestions how to fix this?  Maybe if I looked at the character codes in the string it would help, but the characters visually are whitespace, and so I don't know that the problem is.  My understanding is that  a space in a regular expression will match at least a space or a tab (emacs 24.3.1).
> 
> tlong is multi-line, if that matters.  The fact that it's the result of shell-command-to-string may be more important in making it behave oddly.
> 
> Thanks.
> Ross
> 
> P.S. The code with tlong is typed manually and so might have a transcription error, though I don't see one.
> 
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