similar to: NEWS and readNEWS

Hi all, If a package suggests another package in its description, you can check it at runtime with requires. How do you do check if a package is available without loading it, if you only want to access one function in the package namespace. Thanks, Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University http://had.co.nz/

Hi all, Does anyone have a comprehensive list of recursive-type objects in R? is.recursive defines them as by exclusion: "most types of objects are regarded as recursive, except for vector types, ?NULL? and symbols (as given by ?as.name?)." I think this that means recursive objects are: * lists * pairlists * calls * expressions Did I miss anything? Hadley -- Assistant

Hi all, I'm struggling with accessing a package dataset (munsell.map, stored in sysdata.rda) when that package is imported, not required. A simple reproducible example is: install.packages("munsell") munsell::mnsl("10B 4/6") # Error in match(col, munsell.map$name) : object 'munsell.map' not found library(munsell) munsell::mnsl("10B 4/6") # Function

Hi all, Are there base functions that do the equivalent of this? fliptb <- function(x) x[nrow(x):1, ] fliplr <- function(x) x[, nrow(x):1] Obviously not hard to implement (although it needs some more checks), just wondering if it had already been implemented. Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University http://had.co.nz/

Hi all, Is there any chance that readRDS and saveRDS might one day become read.rds and write.rds? That would make them more consistent with the other reading and writing functions. Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University http://had.co.nz/

Hi all, What's the equivalent to length(unique(x)) == 1 if want to ignore small floating point differences? Should I look at diff(range(x)) or sd(x) or something else? What cut off should I use? If it helps to be explicit, I'm interested in detecting when a vector is constant for the purpose of visual display. In other words, if I rescale x to [0, 1] do I have enough precision to get

Hi all, Does anyone have an R implementation of the queplot (K.?M. Goldberg and B.?Iglewicz. Bivariate extensions of the boxplot. Technometrics, 34(3):pp. 307?320, 1992)? I'm struggling with the estimation of the asymmetry parameters. Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University http://had.co.nz/

Hi all, I frequently find that I've failed to export something in my NAMESPACE and hence my package doesn't work when it's imported into another package. Does anyone have suggestion for debugging this type of problem? R CMD check passes without any ns related errors on both the importee and the importer. I've attached a reproducible example - if you install the development

Hi all, Is there a straight-forward, cross-platform way of determining if a user has all the tools needed to develop R packages (i.e. gcc etc)? It doesn't need to be 100%, but should give a rough idea. One idea I had was simply to see if system("R CMD install --help") worked. Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University

Hi all, Does any one know of any encryption/decryption algorithms in R? I'm not looking for anything robust - I want some way of printing output to the screen that the user can't read immediately, but can decrypt a little later. The main thing I don't want to the user to see is a number, so (e.g.) ROT13 isn't appropriate. Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior

Am I missing something obvious on how to draw multi-line plots in base graphics? In ggplot2, I can do: data(Oxboys, package = "nlme") library(ggplot2) qplot(age, height, data = Oxboys, geom = "line", group = Subject) But in base graphics, the best I can come up with is this: with(Oxboys, plot(age, height, type = "n")) lapply(split(Oxboys[c("age",

Hi, Is there such a thing? If no: is it easily simulated? thanks, Joh

library(plyr) n<-100000 grp1<-sample(1:750, n, replace=T) grp2<-sample(1:750, n, replace=T) d<-data.frame(x=rnorm(n), y=rnorm(n), grp1=grp1, grp2=grp2) system.time({ d$avx1 <- ave(d$x, list(d$grp1, d$grp2)) d$avy1 <- ave(d$y, list(d$grp1, d$grp2)) }) # user system elapsed # 39.300 0.279 40.809 system.time({ d$avx2 <- ave(d$x, interaction(d$grp1, d$grp2, drop =

Hi all, What's the official name for the value that represents a missing argument? e.g. formals(plot)$x str(formals(plot)$x) deparse(formals(plot)$x) is.symbol(formals(plot)$x) What's the correct way to create an object like this? (for example if you are manipulating the formals of a function to add an argument with no default value, as in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3892580/).

Hi all, Does anyone have any suggestions for debugging the execution of examples by R CMD check? The examples work fine when I run them from a live R prompt, but I get errors when they are run by R CMD check. Thanks, Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University http://had.co.nz/

Hi all, all.equal is generally very useful when you want to find the differences between two objects. It breaks down however, when you have two long strings to compare: > all.equal(a, b) [1] "1 string mismatch" Does any one know of any good text diffing tools implemented in R? Thanks, Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice

Hi all, Since roxygen is a great help to document R packages, I am wondering if there exists an approach to go back from the raw Rd files to roxygen-documentation? E.g. turn "\author{Somebody}" into "@author Somebody". This sounds ridiculous, but I believe it helps in the long term for me to maintain R packages. Thanks! Regards, Yihui -- Yihui Xie <xieyihui at

Dear All, a quick xtable question. I do have quite a bunch of tables in my latex document which I produce with xtable. That works fine so far. But I wonder is it possible set some values such as "environement", "caption.placement", or "size" globally so that it applies for table unless otherwise specified? If anybody has quick fix, that would be helpful. Thanks and

Okay. So, after having spent quite some time never really tracking down why my package NEWS files were unacceptable to readNEWS(), I noticed that there was recent (to me anyway) development that allowed the NEWS to be done as an Rd file. Sweet! A more standard format... I converted a NEWS file in one of my unreleased packages to Rd format. checkNEWS() gave it a thumbs up. But then it went south.

Hi all, Under what license are the R manuals (R language definition etc) released? They are not mentioned explicitly in license() and have no license information in the individual documents. Does this mean that they are released under GPL-2? If so, what does that mean, given that they aren't software? Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics