On 3/30/2007 9:16 AM, Alberto Monteiro wrote: > 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.
I don't remember if you've said which platform you're working on, but if you're on Windows, the TCL/TK documentation is available to you. It's in RHOME/Tcl/doc. This is mentioned in the ?tcltk R help topic. I believe most Unix-like systems with TCL/TK support installed would have the same documentation available, but I don't know where. That documentation assumes you're using a TCL interpreter rather than R, so the syntax is all wrong, but there's a mechanical translation from it to R syntax which is described in the ?TkCommands R help topic. So these functions may be horribly documented, but they're not horribly undocumented. Duncan Murdoch > >> 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. ______________________________________________ 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.