| is {methods} | R Documentation |
Is an Object from a Class?
Description
Functions to test inheritance relationships between an object and a
class or between two classes (extends).
Usage
is(object, class2)
extends(class1, class2, maybe = TRUE, fullInfo = FALSE)
Arguments
object |
any R object. |
class1, class2 |
character strings giving the names of each of the two classes
between which |
fullInfo |
In a call to |
maybe |
What to return for conditional inheritance. But such relationships are rarely used and not recommended, so this argument should not be needed. |
Selecting Superclasses
A call to selectSuperClasses(cl) returns a list of
superclasses, similarly to
extends(cl). Additional arguments restrict the class names
returned to direct superclasses and/or to non-virtual classes.
Either way, programming with the result, particularly using
sapply, can be useful.
To find superclasses with more generally defined properties, one can program
with the result returned by extends when called with one
class as argument.
By default, the call returns a character vector including the name of the class
itself and of all its superclasses.
Alternatively,
if extends is called with fullInfo =
TRUE, the return value is a named list, its names being the previous
character vector. The elements of the list corresponding to
superclasses are objects of class
SClassExtension. Of the information in these objects, one piece can be useful:
the number of generations between the classes, given by the
"distance" slot.
Programming with the result of the call to extends, particularly using
sapply, can select superclasses.
The programming technique is to define a test function that returns
TRUE for superclasses or relationships obeying some
requirement. For example, to find only next-to-direct superclasses,
use this function with the list of extension objects:
function(what) is(what, "SClassExtension") && what@distance == 2
or, to find only superclasses from "myPkg", use this function
with the simple vector of names:
function(what) getClassDef(what)@package == "myPkg"
Giving such functions as an argument to sapply called on the output of
extends allows you to find
superclasses with desired properties. See the examples below.
Note that the function using extension objects must test the class of its argument since,
unfortunately for this purpose, the list returned by extends includes
class1 itself, as the object TRUE.
Note
Prior to R 4.2.0 the code used the first elements of class1
and class2, silently, These are now required to be length-one
character vectors.
References
Chambers, John M. (2016) Extending R, Chapman & Hall. (Chapters 9 and 10.)
See Also
Although inherits is defined for S3 classes, it has
been modified so that the result returned is nearly always equivalent to
is, both for S4 and non-S4 objects. Since it is implemented
in C, it is somewhat faster.
The only non-equivalences arise from use of setIs,
which should rarely be encountered.
Examples
## Not run:
## this example can be run if package XRPython from CRAN is installed.
supers <- extends("PythonInterface")
## find all the superclasses from package XR
fromXR <- sapply(supers,
function(what) getClassDef(what)@package == "XR")
## print them
supers[fromXR]
## find all the superclasses at distance 2
superRelations <- extends("PythonInterface", fullInfo = TRUE)
dist2 <- sapply(superRelations,
function(what) is(what, "SClassExtension") && what@distance == 2)
## print them
names(superRelations)[dist2]
## End(Not run)