[Rd] A possible improvement to apropos

[Martin Maechler]

Hi Seth,

>>>>> "Seth" == Seth Falcon <sfalcon at fhcrc.org>
>>>>>     on Wed, 13 Dec 2006 16:38:02 -0800 writes:

    Seth> Hello all, I've had the following apropos alternative
    Seth> in my ~/.Rprofile for some time, and have found it
    Seth> more useful than the current version.  Basically, my
    Seth> version ignores case when searching.

    Seth> If others find this useful, perhaps apropos could be
    Seth> suitably patched (and I'd be willing to create such a
    Seth> patch).

Could you live with typing 'i=T' (i.e.  ignore.case=TRUE)?

In principle, I'd like to keep the default  as ignore.case=FALSE,
since we'd really should teach the users that R 
*is* case sensitive.
Ignoring case is the exception in the S/R/C world, not the rule

I have a patch ready which implements your suggestion
(but not quite with the code below), but as said, not as
default.

Martin

    Seth> + seth

    Seth> Here is my version of apropos:

>> APROPOS <- function (what, where = FALSE, mode = "any") 
>> {
>>     if (!is.character(what))
>>       stop("argument ", sQuote("what"), " must be a character vector")
>>     x <- character(0)
>>     check.mode <- mode != "any"
>>     for (i in seq(search())) {
>>         contents <- ls(pos = i, all.names = TRUE)
>>         found <- grep(what, contents, ignore.case = TRUE, value = TRUE)
>>         if (length(found)) {
>>             if (check.mode) {
>>                 found <- found[sapply(found, function(x) {
>>                     exists(x, where = i, mode = mode, inherits = FALSE)
>>                 })]
>>             }
>>             numFound <- length(found)
>>             x <- c(x, if (where)
>>                    structure(found, names = rep.int(i, numFound)) else found)
>>         }
>>     }
>>     x
>> }