R devel - Aug 2011 - Referencing 'inst' directory in installed package

Hi,
My R package has files in the 'inst' directory that it needs to
reference. How can the R scripts in my package find out the full path to the
'inst' directory after the package is installed, given that different
users may have installed the package to different libraries?

Thanks,
Jon Malmaud

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 11:17 PM, Jonathan Malmaud <malmaud at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi,
> My R package has files in the 'inst' directory that it needs to
reference. How can the R scripts in my package find out the full path to the
'inst' directory after the package is installed, given that different
users may have installed the package to different libraries?

The inst directory does not exists after installation (this is
described in R-exts).  Use something like
   system.file("extdata", package = "MyPackage")
to locate a directory etc.

Kasper


>
> Thanks,
> Jon Malmaud
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

On Aug 16, 2011, at 10:17 PM, Jonathan Malmaud wrote:
> Hi,
> My R package has files in the 'inst' directory that it needs to
reference. How can the R scripts in my package find out the full path to the
'inst' directory after the package is installed, given that different
users may have installed the package to different libraries?
> 
> Thanks,
> Jon Malmaud

See ?path.package and ?file.path

Example:
> require(WriteXLS)
Loading required package: WriteXLS

# I am on OSX
> path.package("WriteXLS")
[1]
"/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/2.13/Resources/library/WriteXLS"

I have Perl scripts in my package, which are in the /inst/Perl folder in the
package source, so:
> file.path(path.package("WriteXLS"), "Perl/WriteXLS.pl")
[1]
"/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/2.13/Resources/library/WriteXLS/Perl/WriteXLS.pl"


HTH,

Marc Schwartz

On 16 August 2011 at 23:17, Jonathan Malmaud wrote:
| Hi,
| My R package has files in the 'inst' directory that it needs to
reference. How can the R scripts in my package find out the full path to the
'inst' directory after the package is installed, given that different
users may have installed the package to different libraries?

It is slightly different:  files and directories below the inst/ directory in
the _sources_ will be installed in the toplevel diretory of the _installed
package_.

You can then use system.file() to get the location at run-time for the
installed package. E.g. to get the example file 'fib.r' from the
Fibonacci
directory within the examples of Rcpp of my installed version:

R> system.file(package="Rcpp", "examples",
"Fibonacci", "fib.r")
[1] "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/Rcpp/examples/Fibonacci/fib.r"

The result of that system.file() call could now be fed to source() etc. 

system.file() can be used for other files within the package too. 'Writing R
Extensions' details what other files are installed by default -- but as
stated, everything below inst/ gets copied as is, without the layer of inst/
itself.

Hope this helps,  Dirk

-- 
Two new Rcpp master classes for R and C++ integration scheduled for 
New York (Sep 24) and San Francisco (Oct 8), more details are at
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2011/08/04#rcpp_classes_2011-09_and_2011-10
http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/products/training/public/rcpp-master-class.php

You can use
system.file(package="your_package_name")
which will return you library directory.


-----Original Message-----
From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org
[mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Malmaud
Sent: 17 August 2011 04:18
To: r-devel at r-project.org
Subject: [Rd] Referencing 'inst' directory in installed package

Hi,
My R package has files in the 'inst' directory that it needs to
reference. How can the R scripts in my package find out the full path to
the 'inst' directory after the package is installed, given that
different users may have installed the package to different libraries? 

Thanks,
Jon Malmaud
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