Romain Francois wrote: > >> Say I don't know (and I can't understand the help) how to >> use the rnorm function. If I do RSiteSearch("rnorm"), I >> will get too much useless information. OTOH, an ideal wikipedia >> would have a page http://www.r-wiki.org/rnorm, where I could >> find examples, learn the theory, browse the source code, and >> have links to similar functions. OK, maybe that's too much, I >> would be happy just to have some examples :-) > > Do you mean something like (it fullfills basically all your > requirements) : > > R> rnorm # get the code > R> ?rnorm # get the help page > This works when there's a decent documentation for the function. The functions in the tcltk package, for example, are horribly undocumented, and asking for help only loops to a general help about all (and none) of the functions. > The wiki already has a similar thing, for example for rnorm, you can > go to: http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=rdoc:stats:Normal > I didn't like the way it worked. I searched for rnorm and Norm, and I got a list of pages. Even for this trivial example, I have no idea how I could find anything using the Search.
> There has been (recently and less recently) some discussions on the > r-sig-wiki list about why sometimes you get ~~RDOC~~ instead of the > documentation page, it is still a work in progress. > > The only tricky bit is how do I know that I have to go to > stats:normal, well you can ask that to R, for example using that > small function : > > wikiHelp <- function( ... , sarcasm = TRUE ){ > if( length(hp <- help(...) ) > 0 ){ > hp <- tail( strsplit(hp[1], "/")[[1]], 3 ) > wikiPage <- > sprintf("http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=rdoc:%s:%s", > hp[1], hp[3]) > cat("the following wiki page will be displayed in your > browser:", wikiPage, ">>> Please feel > free to add information if you have some, " , sep = "\n") if( > sarcasm) cat( ">>> except if you are an evil person\n") > browseURL(wikiPage) } else print( hp ) } > Nice code :-) R> wikiHelp( rnorm ) ~~RDOC~~ # what is this? R> wikiHelp( tkWidgets ) No documentation for 'tkWidgets' in specified packages and libraries: you could try 'help.search("tkWidgets")' R> wikiHelp( seq ) Here it worked as expected. > > The wiki has its own search engine already, so you can go there > and use it. I guess you can search for "search" there and get > info on how to search. > :-))))))))))))))))))))) Or I could ask help(help) to learn how help works :-P Alberto Monteiro ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.