How to print an R object to stderr in Rcpp? - r

Question

I implemented a Python-style dictionary for R, but did not find a good way to raise an error when a given key does not have a value in the dictionary. Calling stop is easy enough, but I would like to tell the user which key has not been found by printing the R object. Right now I have:
Rcpp::Rcout << "Key not found: ";
Rcpp::print(key); # <-- how can I get this on stderr?
Rcpp::stop("Key error!");
This prints the message to stdout, but I'd rather have it on stderr. Probably I'm just missing a function that Rcpp provides?
Here's a MWE:
library(Rcpp)
sourceCpp(code='
#include <Rcpp.h>
using namespace Rcpp;
// [[Rcpp::export]]
void test(SEXP key) {
Rcpp::print(key);
Rcpp::Rcerr << "This does not work: " << key << std::endl;
}
/*** R
test("x")
test(c(1,2,3))
*/
')

Answer 1

This works just fine:
#include <Rcpp.h>
using namespace Rcpp;
// [[Rcpp::export]]
std::string test(std::string key) {
Rcpp::Rcerr << "Key not found: "<< key << std::endl;
Rcpp::stop("Key error!");
return key;
}
/*** R
test("x")
*/
Output:
Key not found: x
Error in eval(expr, envir, enclos) : Key error!
Edit:
OK, so you pass a SEXP that can be a single value or vector. I would suggest to cast that to a character vector:
#include <Rcpp.h>
using namespace Rcpp;
// [[Rcpp::export]]
void test(SEXP key) {
CharacterVector key1 = as<CharacterVector>(key);
Rcpp::Rcerr << "This does not work: " << key1 << std::endl;
}
/*** R
test(c("x", "y"))
test(1:3)
*/
Output:
> Rcpp::sourceCpp('E:/temp/ttt.cpp')
> test(c("x", "y"))
This does not work: "x" "y"
> test(1:3)
This does not work: "1" "2" "3"

Answer 2

At the moment, it seems that this hack is the only way to go. It's not very efficient, as we go back from C++ to R to get the value as a nice string.
library(Rcpp)
sourceCpp(code='
#include <Rcpp.h>
using namespace Rcpp;
// [[Rcpp::export]]
void test(SEXP key, Function generate_error) {
std::string s = as<std::string>(generate_error(key));
stop(s);
}
/*** R
generate_error <- function(key) {
paste("Key not found:", capture.output(print(key)))
}
try( test("x", generate_error) )
try( test(c(1,2,3), generate_error) )
*/
')

Answer 3

Rcpp calls Rf_PrintValue internally. I've glanced at R source and it seems like this function is in turn implemented using printfs.
So, the problem is how to redirect external printf calls to stderr. Depending on your platform you have multiple options like dup/freopen/CreatePipe etc. Arguably, redirecting stdout back and forth is a hack.