#R STUDIO HELP CODE#

I came to R as a person with limited programming experience and an ambitious goal, and taught myself from books and help forums. This could have, and I think should have, been implemented as a hyperlink from the package name in parentheses at the top of each function page, but failing that, a button could have much same effect. the page you get to with help(package = 'packagename'). Secondly, I think there should be a button to take you from the function help to the package help, i.e. I also learned that some of them contain invisible characters that make them behave incomprehensibly if run in this way. When I was new to R I managed to overlook the existence of the examples function and thought you could only run them by cut and paste or in your head.

#R STUDIO HELP CODE#

I urge you to add a button to run the code examples. There are also a number of straightforward additions that would be simple to implement and save typing and time. I really think that virtually everyone would be happier with that, and especially newer R users who have to make more frequent reference to help pages.

The second expansion would be to the current search results. And then a second level that gives the current behavior. Nearly all of these mentions can be identified mechanically by monospace formatting. I think this level should also include help pages that mention the search term as a code object. The first should return any kind of R object of that name (packages, data sets, parameters, vignettes, code demonstrations), and also page names that are not primarily pages for particular function, like the regex page. So I think nearly everyone would be happier if the default behavior of help search was to return only functions that match the name you have supplied, if such exists, with two levels of expansion (via buttons, maybe). So you have a whole bunch of irrelevant pages and no guidance as to where the actual function is hiding. Moreover, the page name and page description of the help page for a function may not even contain the name of that function. if you have multiple packages that use the function 'expand', you will get back help pages containing the words expansion, expended, and expenditure, none of them as the names of R objects. Finally, when looking for a function help, you typically want the help page for that function, and not just page that happens to mention it.Īctually, if there is more than one object with a specified name, it not only gives you those, but all sorts of other things - names that contain that names, names that do not contain the name but that a spellchecker might return (e.g. And I think if you are looking for anything else, you usually don't want a function.

I would like to suggest several I think straightforward modifications to the RStudio implementation of R help that I think would together render it considerably more helpful.įirst, I think a person usually knows what kind of object they are looking for, and indeed, I think people are far more likely to look for function help than anything else.

R studio help