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illegal characters in names

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Dorothy Bishop's picture
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Joined: 02/04/2010 - 02:20
illegal characters in names

I noticed that you are modifying OpenMx to disallow forbidden characters in names or labels: "+-!~?:*/^%<>=&|$"
Just to say that this will have implications for some of the demonstration scripts. I have not checked them all, but the model on p 31 of the OpenMx documentation has a model name that won't work, and I have also found cases in demo files where the objective has the name "-2LL".

For beginners used to other programming languages, the fact that a syntax error does not terminate operation of a script is confusing.
Is this a deliberate choice, an unchangeable feature of R, or something worth considering modifying? I'd prefer it if the script just stopped execution at the error, so I could be sure to fix it before proceeding.

mspiegel's picture
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Joined: 07/31/2009 - 15:24
Are you looking at Release

Are you looking at Release 0.2.10-1172 of the documentation? I thought we are catching any runtime errors in the user manual.

Dorothy Bishop's picture
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Joined: 02/04/2010 - 02:20
Yes, I had older version.

Yes, I had older version. Have now updated.
But I think this may still affect some 'demo' scripts, unless they have been checked as well, and certainly it applies to some of those available from:
http://www.vipbg.vcu.edu/~vipbg/OpenMx/
I think the manual might just include a note saying :
Some downloadable OpenMx scripts were written before OpenMx introduced restrictions on illegal characters in names of objects. Check all output carefully, and if necessary rename models and their component objects to avoid the following characters: +-!~?:*/^%<>=&|$

neale's picture
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Joined: 07/31/2009 - 15:14
Yes, any such scripts should

Yes, any such scripts should really be fixed though. Are there any you know for sure are broken?

mspiegel's picture
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Joined: 07/31/2009 - 15:24
To clarify, this issue is not

To clarify, this issue is not affecting either the demo scripts or the snippets of code in the user guide, with respect to version 0.2.10. We now have automated systems that check for any syntax errors.