R 3.4.1 is released – with some Windows related bug-fixes

R 3.4.1 (codename “Single Candle”) was released several days ago. You can get the latest binaries version from here. (or the .tar.gz source code from here).

As mentioned last week by David Smith, R 3.4.1 includes several Windows related bug fixed:

including an issue sometimes encountered when attempting to install packages on Windows, and problems displaying functions including Unicode characters (like “日本語”) in the Windows GUI.

The full list of bug fixes and new features is provided below.

Upgrading to R 3.4.1 on Windows

If you are using Windows you can easily upgrade to the latest version of R using the installr package. Simply run the following code in Rgui:

install.packages("installr") # install 
setInternet2(TRUE) # only for R versions older than 3.3.0
installr::updateR() # updating R.
# If you wish it to go faster, run: installr::updateR(T)

Running “updateR()” will detect if there is a new R version available, and if so it will download+install it (etc.). There is also a step by step tutorial (with screenshots) on how to upgrade R on Windows, using the installr package. If you only see the option to upgrade to an older version of R, then change your mirror or try again in a few hours (it usually take around 24 hours for all CRAN mirrors to get the latest version of R).

I try to keep the installr package updated and useful, so if you have any suggestions or remarks on the package – you are invited to open an issue in the github page.

CHANGES IN R 3.4.1

INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE

• The deprecated support for PCRE versions older than 8.20 has been removed.

BUG FIXES

• getParseData() gave incorrect column information when code contained multi-byte characters. (PR#17254)
• Asking for help using expressions like ?stats::cor() did not work. (PR#17250)
• readRDS(url(....)) now works.
• R CMD Sweave again returns status = 0 on successful completion.
• Vignettes listed in ‘.Rbuildignore’ were not being ignored properly. (PR#17246)
• file.mtime() no longer returns NA on Windows when the file or directory is being used by another process. This affected installed.packages(), which is now protected against this.
• R CMD INSTALL Windows .zip file obeys --lock and --pkglock flags.
• (Windows only) The choose.files() function could return incorrect results when called with multi = FALSE. (PR#17270)
• aggregate(<data.frame>, drop = FALSE) now also works in case of near-equal numbers in by. (PR#16918)
• fourfoldplot() could encounter integer overflow when calculating the odds ratio. (PR#17286)
• parse() no longer gives spurious warnings when extracting srcrefs from a file not encoded in the current locale.

  This was seen from R CMD check with ‘inst/doc/*.R’ files, and check has some additional protection for such files.

• print.noquote(x) now always returns its argument x (invisibly).
• Non-UTF-8 multibyte character sets were not handled properly in source references. (PR#16732)