Today, together with a friend who is looking to get into data analytics, I started doing the 100 days of Python challenge at Replit.

I thought it would be a good idea to do the challenges in R, because why not. 🙂

So, I am at day 2 (whoohooo I did two challenges in one day), when I notice that Ctrl+Enter for running the code in Python and in R is not the same thing.

Challenge 2 is about user input, so in Python you have something like:

name = input("Your name: ")
email = input("Your email: ")

When running this with Ctrl+Enter, Python prompts for name, and waits. Once name is entered, prompts for email.

In R the equivalent would be:

name <- readline("Your name: ")
email <- readline("Your email: ")

When running this with Ctrl+Enter in Rstudio, R prompts for name, but then enters the next line as the input for the prompt.

> name <- readline("Your name: ")
Your name: email <- readline("Your email: ")

I thought this was strange. I first thought that maybe the Replit environment is configured to work in such a way. But then I got the same behavior running the code in a Jupyter notebook on my computer.

The issue is then on R’s side, or at least Rstudio’s side. When running code with Ctrl+Enter, the code is being entered line by line in the terminal, causing the next line to be entered as input to the first readline().

However, clicking on the Source button to run the script, produces the behavior experienced with Python: R waits for the user to respond to the prompt, instead of entering the next line as input to the first readline().

When running this with Ctrl+Enter in VSCode with radian as the R console, R again waits for the user to respond to the prompt.

On to challenge 3. 🙂