Changes in R 4.6.2:
Bug Fixes:
• In plain-text help (Rd2txt), paragraphs are again recognized even
when started with a non-indented Rd comment, fixing a regression
in R 4.4.0.
• rhyper(N, m, n, k) now switches to the “large” scenario when m +
n is larger than .Machine$integer.max, preventing integer
overflow, thanks to Jonathan Blood's report on R-devel.
• Fix long standing (Fortran compiler optimization related) bug in
nlminb with constraints, thanks to Kasper Kristensen's PR#19086
report and patch.
• Fix for PR#19100: seq.int was not handling non-vector along.width
arguments properly. Thanks to Mitchell O'Hara-Wild.
• Wrappers now duplicate even a wrapped object that might be shared
before returning a read-only pointer. This prevents cached
read-only pointers from becoming invalid. Reported by Ivan
Krylov.
• dummy.coef() becomes more robust to non-syntactic variable names,
fixing PR#18468. Thanks to Bill Dunlap and ‘R Dev Day’
participants Vincent Arel-Bundock, Cynthia Huang, Tina Rozsos and
Marina Marinelli.
• Now PROTECT() in SubassignTypeFix, fixing PR#19110 thanks to
Kevin Ushey.
• writeChar() in a multibyte locale counts characters and bytes
consistently and no longer overflows, thanks to Kevin Ushey's
report and patch in PR#19112.
• dim(a) <- vec now checks for too large prod(vec), thanks to Kevin
Ushey's report and patch in PR#19109.
• Tweaks (including to the parsers) for the C23 behaviour
(preserving const) of strchr, strrchr and strstr. (By Brian
Ripley and Duncan Murdoch.)
• make check-devel now works without recommended packages.
• <matrix>[[i, j]] with negative i occasionally gives no error but
accesses previous content; thanks to Kevin Ushey's report and
very simple fix in PR#19116.
• Quartz device now correctly draws long paths (work-around for
Quartz built-in stroker breaking long paths). Thanks to R Dev Day
@ useR! 2026 contributors, notably Tomek Gieorgijewski, report in
PR#18680.
• strptime(ch, "...%OS<n>...") now disregards contiguous digits in
"", for symmetry with strftime(), fulfilling Frederick Eaton's
wish in PR#17209, thanks to a patch by Suharto Anggono.
• strptime() now also returns NA for out of range "%OS" and a
correct error message in some wrong multibyte cases, fixing
PR#19117 comment wch#1 and PR#19122 by Michael Chirico;
additionally, some overflow to Inf times no longer result in NA.
• strptime("0", "%w") in a "C" locale now works in valid cases,
returning NA for invalid week numbers ("%U" or "%W"), fixing
PR#19124 thanks to Michael Chirico's report and notably Suharto
Anggono's analysis, also correctly fixing PR#15195.
• ksmooth(x,y, x.points=NULL) now returns an empty (x,y) pair
instead of crashing R, fixing PR#19153.
Additionally, also by Adam Berkeš, x <- rep(999,0); ksmooth(x, x,
x.points = 1) no longer writes out of bounds, fixing PR#19171.
Ditto for ksmooth(x, x, n.points = 0), PR#19219.
• besselI(1, 1e11) and besselK(..) now signal a warning and return
NaN instead of typically segfaulting, fixing PR#19175 thanks to
Ben Bolker.
Further, besselK(1, -1e11) and similar warn about too large |nu|,
returning NaN rather than segfaulting, fixing PR#19196 thanks to
Adam Berkeš.
• text.default(.., col = numeric(0)) and similar no longer segfault
in "instrumented" versions of R, fixing PR#19178 thanks to Jiang
Yuancheng's fusion-fuzz and Ivan Krylov.
• R CMD rtags (on Unix-alikes) no longer fails from a bad escape if
sh is bash or busybox.
• capabilities("X11") no longer incorrectly returns TRUE on a
Unix-alike where X11 is not actually available when built by a C
compiler without C23 enum base types, thanks to Trevor Davis'
report and patch in PR#19180.
• predict(smooth.spline(..), deriv = -99) and similar invalid deriv
values now signal errors instead of segfaulting, thanks to Adam
Berkeš' report and proposal in PR#19190.
• format(x, width = 2^31 -1) for an non-ascii character x such as x
= "\u00e9" now signals an error as the required width is too
large, rather than segfaulting, thanks to Adam Berkeš' report in
PR#19188.
• influence.measures() inadvertently wasn't updated along with
dffits(), dfbetas(), covratio(). PR#19167 by Amal Tawfik.
• If wilcox.test(..., exact=TRUE)'s p-value is close to the 0 or 1
boundaries, the calculation no longer suffers severely from
cancellation, thanks to Tasuku Kobayashi's reports and Ahmed
Sattar Jabbar's suggestion in PR#19144.
• Long stringed error messages are now protected from premature
garbage collection, fixing PR#19210, reported and analyzed by
Yuancheng Jiang.
• strsplit(str, perl=TRUE, bytes=TRUE) no longer accesses invalid
memory in case str is an invalid UTF-8 string, fixing PR#19212,
thanks to Kevin Ushey.
• isoreg(numeric(0)) no longer returns unallocated component yc,
fixing PR#19224 thanks to Kevin Ushey.
• KalmanLike(1:5, list(1,2)) and similar no longer segfault, fixing
PR#19217 thanks to Kevin Ushey and Adam Berkeš.
Bug Fixes (Windows):
• path.expand("~") and similar now should work correctly on Windows
when the user name is not in ASCII and neither %HOME% nor %USER%
environment variables are set, fixing PR#18949 thanks to the
report and patch from Ivan Krylov and Mauricio Vargas's R Dev Day
work.
• file.copy(*, date=TRUE) no longer opens files for exclusive
access when copying the file time. Consequently, the time is
copied now and concurrent attempts to open the source file should
work reliably, thanks to Kevin Ushey's report and patch in
PR#19187.