I'd like to construct a function is.empty(x) which would work on arbitrary objects, and would tell me whether the object contains any data. I think that I can write a function which will recurse down through all the slots of x (and slots of slots) until it reaches objects of elementary type (NULL, character, numeric, logical, matrix, function, data.frame and possibly others) and then tests for length zero or nullness. But does such a function already exist? Or is there a cleverer or more direct way to do it? I've looked through the online help for the methods package, and I've done a keyword search through the R help for "empty" without finding something that looks relevant. Thanks Gordon