On 25/04/2008 2:47 PM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote: > On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Deepayan Sarkar wrote: > >> For what it's worth, I use ?foo mostly to look up usage of functions >> that I know I want to use, and find it perfect for that (one benefit >> over help() is that completion works for ?). The only thing I miss is >> the ability to do the equivalent of help("foo", package = "bar"); >> ?bar::foo gives the help page for "::". Perhaps that would be >> something to consider for addition. > > That fits most naturally with the (somewhat technical) idea that bar::foo > becomes a symbol and not a function call. I believe that several of think > that is in principle a better idea, but no one has as yet (AFAIK) explored > the ramifications. > > However, 5 mins looking at the sources suggests that it is easy to do.
And you already did. Thanks! I'm going to make the following change soon (in R-devel). ??foo will now be like help.search("foo"). This will work with your change, so ??utils::foo will limit the search to the utils package. This is also quite easy. A more difficult thing I'd like to do is to broaden the search to look outside the man pages, but that's a lot harder, and I haven't started on it. I will also follow Hadley's suggestion and change the format of the help.search results, so you can just cut and paste after a question mark to look up the particular topic, e.g. ??foo gives utils::citEntry Writing Package CITATION Files Type '?PKG::FOO' to inspect entry 'PKG::FOO TITLE'. I haven't touched the case of ?foo failing; I'll want to try it for a while to decide whether I like it best as is: > ?foo No documentation for 'foo' in specified packages and libraries: you could try '??foo' or whether it should just automatically call help.search, or something in between. Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel