R help - Aug 2010 - printing html help to the terminal

I'm trying to get help to print the help pages in html format to the
terminal. This is in order to be able to see the html help files remotely.

If I do
printURL = function(file) {a=readLines(url(file));cat(a,sep="\n")}
options(browser=printURL)
options(help_type="html")

then invoking help with
?print

gets stuck. I think what happens is that the web server run by R that allows
one to read help will not work as long as R is waiting for the function to
complete. Thus, if I run a second R session, and try to read the help files
that one session produces from the other, I have no problems.

I also tried
options(browser="wget -O- ")

But again, while R is waiting for the command to complete, the web server is
dead.

Is there a better way to accomplish this?

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On 04/08/2010 12:44 PM, Michael Lachmann wrote:
> I'm trying to get help to print the help pages in html format to the
> terminal. This is in order to be able to see the html help files remotely.
>
> If I do
> printURL = function(file)
{a=readLines(url(file));cat(a,sep="\n")}
> options(browser=printURL)
> options(help_type="html")
>
> then invoking help with
> ?print
>
> gets stuck. I think what happens is that the web server run by R that
allows
> one to read help will not work as long as R is waiting for the function to
> complete. Thus, if I run a second R session, and try to read the help files
> that one session produces from the other, I have no problems.
>
> I also tried
> options(browser="wget -O- ")
>
> But again, while R is waiting for the command to complete, the web server
is
> dead.
>
> Is there a better way to accomplish this?
>
>   
What you're doing should work, and it works for me in 2.11.1 in 
Windows.  Not sure why it doesn't work for you.

A more direct way to get the HTML output for a help file is to use the 
internal utilities that R uses.  You get the help page using

page <- utils:::.getHelpFile(?print)

(remember to keep that question mark!), and use

tools::Rd2HTML(page)

to turn it into HTML.


Duncan Murdoch