Richard M. Heiberger
2006-Apr-29 21:01 UTC
[R] Resolving conflicting function definitions {was "Error in rm.outlier"}
I agree that conflicts() belongs in the posting guide. I devoted a small section in my book to that very topic. Here is the lead paragraph which you are welcome to use Inexplicable Error Messages In general, weird and inexplicable errors mean that there are masked function names. That's the easy part. The trick is to find which name. The name conflict is frequently inside a function that has been called by the function that you called directly. The general method, which we usually won't need, is to trace the action of the function you called, and all the functions it called in turn. See {\tt ?trace}, {\tt ?browser}, {\tt ?recover} and {\tt ?debugger} for help on using these functions. The method we will use is to find all occurrences of our names that might mask system functions. S-Plus and R provide two functions that help us. See {\tt ?find} and {\tt ?conflicts} for further detail.