I am trying to mimic the results of a fasttext command line operation in R using the system function. When I run the prompt in the command line I get the desired results as below:
F:\>fasttext print-sentence-vectors model.bin < sentences.txt
0.072631 0.036104 0.0046829 0.057456 0.03449
When I try to mimic this in R I get the following:
> system("fasttext print-sentence-vectors model.bin < sentences.txt")
usage: fasttext print-sentence-vectors <model>
<model> model filename
[1] 1
I believe the issue is the requirement of "<" in the command line since when I remove it from the command line prompt I get
F:\>fasttext print-sentence-vectors model.bin sentences.txt
usage: fasttext print-sentence-vectors <model>
<model> model filename
Same as what I get in R. So my question is, how do I go about resolving this in R ? I tried various versions with the paste function as well as wrapping the < in quotes but nothing seemed to work.
Tried shell() as per a comment below and got this error message
> shell("fasttext print-sentence-vectors model.bin < sentences.txt")
'\\mypathname\fasttextstuff'
CMD.EXE was started with the above path as the current directory.
UNC paths are not supported. Defaulting to Windows directory.
The system cannot find the file specified.
Warning message:
In shell("fasttext print-sentence-vectors model.bin < sentences.txt") :
'fasttext print-sentence-vectors model.bin < sentences.txt' execution failed with error code 1
Turns out shell() worked as per the comment below with a directory change.
The redirection symbol < is handled by your command shell, not by fasttext. It looks as though you are on Windows, and on that OS R doesn't run a shell when running system(). Use shell() instead.
After that failed, this fixes it: make sure that your current directory uses a drive letter (e.g. D:), not a UNC path, which CMD.EXE doesn't like.