[R] Glossay of available R functions

[Christos Hatzis]

Patricia,

If I understand correctly what you need, this is already available through
the main help page.  If you type help.start() to get to the html help, then
follow the link "Packages".  This will give you an index of all available
packages installed on your system (base + contributed).  Clicking on any of
the package names will give you a list of available functions in that
package.  This is a nice way to present a categorized index of several
thousand functions.  An additional advantage is that this index will be
updated if you install more packages on your system.

Hope this helps.

Christos Hatzis
Nuvera Biosciences, Inc.
400 West Cummings Park
Suite 2850
Woburn, MA 01801
Tel: 781-938-3830
www.nuverabio.com
 

  

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
[mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Prof Brian Ripley
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 3:10 AM
To: Patricia J. Hawkins
Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R] Glossay of available R functions

On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, Patricia J. Hawkins wrote:

>>>>>> "ASA" == Alexandre Santos Aguiar <asaguiar at spsconsultoria.com>
writes:
>
> ASA> I am new to R and read this list to learn. It is amazing how 
> ASA> frequently new functions pop in messages. Useful and timesaving 
> ASA> functions like subset (above) must be documented somewhere.
>
> ASA> Is there a glossary of functions?
>
> I'm also new to R, and was wondering the same thing.  Took a bunch of 
> tries, but if you run start.help() and then choose Packages, then 
> Base, you will get the list of functions.

You get a list of objects (not just functions) in the base package.  You can
also get a list by library(help=base).

However, that is far from all the functions available in base R.
As a quick check

as.matrix(sapply(search(), function(x) length(ls(x, all=TRUE))))

.GlobalEnv           0
package:methods    299
package:stats      497
package:graphics    79
package:grDevices   78
package:utils      152
package:datasets   103
Autoloads            1
package:base      1090

so it is less than half the objects loaded and visible in a default session.
And there are another 18 packages shipped with R.

Looking at a list of 2300 objects is daunting, and so we provide search
facilities (including via the HTML pages).

> As a newcomer, I hesitate to suggest this, but maybe there should be a 
> comment on the index page to that effect?

Which index page?  If you mean that given by help.start(), it is not a
common request, and search is linked from there.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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