R 3.4.3 is released (a bug-fix release)

R 3.4.3 (codename “Kite-Eating Tree”) was released last week. You can get the latest binaries version from here. (or the .tar.gz source code from here).

As mentioned by David Smith, R 3.4.3 is primarily a bug-fix release:

It fixes an issue with incorrect time zones on MacOS High Sierra, and some issues with handling Unicode characters. (Incidentally, representing international and special characters is something that R takes great care in handling properly. It’s not an easy task: a 2003 essay by Joel Spolsky describes the minefield that is character representation, and not much has changed since then.)

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

Upgrading to R 3.4.3 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 3.4.3

INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE

• A workaround has been added for the changes in location of time-zone files in macOS 10.13 ‘High Sierra’ and again in 10.13.1, so the default time zone is deduced correctly from the system setting when R is configured with –with-internal-tzcode (the default on macOS).
• R CMD javareconf has been updated to recognize the use of a Java 9 SDK on macOS.

BUG FIXES

• raw(0) & raw(0) and raw(0) | raw(0) again return raw(0) (rather than logical(0)).
• intToUtf8() converts integers corresponding to surrogate code points to NA rather than invalid UTF-8, as well as values larger than the current Unicode maximum of 0x10FFFF. (This aligns with the current RFC3629.)
• Fix calling of methods on S4 generics that dispatch on ... when the call contains ....
• Following Unicode ‘Corrigendum 9’, the UTF-8 representations of U+FFFE and U+FFFF are now regarded as valid by utf8ToInt().
• range(c(TRUE, NA), finite = TRUE) and similar no longer return NA. (Reported by Lukas Stadler.)
• The self starting function attr(SSlogis, "initial") now also works when the y values have exact minimum zero and is slightly changed in general, behaving symmetrically in the y range.
• The printing of named raw vectors is now formatted nicely as for other such atomic vectors, thanks to Lukas Stadler.