Raw Vectors

Description

Creates or tests for objects of type "raw".

Usage

raw(length = 0)
as.raw(x)
is.raw(x)

Arguments

Details

The raw type is intended to hold raw bytes. It is possible to extract subsequences of bytes, and to replace elements (but only by elements of a raw vector). The relational operators (see Comparison, using the numerical order of the byte representation) work, as do the logical operators (see Logic) with a bitwise interpretation.

A raw vector is printed with each byte separately represented as a pair of hex digits. If you want to see a character representation (with escape sequences for non-printing characters) use rawToChar.

Coercion to raw treats the input values as representing small (decimal) integers, so the input is first coerced to integer, and then values which are outside the range [0 ... 255] or are NA are set to 0 (the nul byte).

as.raw and is.raw are primitive functions.

Value

raw creates a raw vector of the specified length. Each element of the vector is equal to 0. Raw vectors are used to store fixed-length sequences of bytes.

as.raw attempts to coerce its argument to be of raw type. The (elementwise) answer will be 0 unless the coercion succeeds (or if the original value successfully coerces to 0).

is.raw returns true if and only if typeof(x) == "raw".

See Also

charToRaw, rawShift, etc.

& for bitwise operations on raw vectors.

Examples

xx <- raw(2)
xx[1] <- as.raw(40)     # NB, not just 40.
xx[2] <- charToRaw("A")
xx       ## 28 41   -- raw prints hexadecimals
dput(xx) ## as.raw(c(0x28, 0x41))
as.integer(xx) ## 40 65

x <- "A test string"
(y <- charToRaw(x))
is.vector(y) # TRUE
rawToChar(y)
is.raw(x)
is.raw(y)
stopifnot( charToRaw("\xa3") == as.raw(0xa3) )

isASCII <-  function(txt) all(charToRaw(txt) <= as.raw(127))
isASCII(x)  # true
isASCII("\xa325.63") # false (in Latin-1, this is an amount in UK pounds)