[R] listing all functions in R

[Gavin Simpson]

On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 10:43 -0500, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 1/6/2007 9:25 AM, Gavin Simpson wrote:
> > On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 13:48 +0000, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> >> Could you tell us what you mean by
> > 
> > Thank you for your reply, Prof. Ripley.
> > 
> >> - 'function'  (if() and + are functions in R, so do you want those?)
> > 
> > I was thinking about functions that are used like this: foo()
> > So I don't need things like "names<-". I don't need functions like +. -,
> > $, as I can highlight the separately if desired, though I'm not doing
> > this at the moment.
> > 
> > Functions like for() while(), if() function() are handled separately.
> > 
> >> - 'a base R installation'?   What is 'base R' (standard + recommended 
> >> packages?)  And on what platform: the list is platform-specific?
> > 
> > Yes, I mean standard + recommended packages. As for platform, most of my
> > intended audience will be MS Windows users, though I am using Linux
> > (Fedora) to generate this list (i.e. my R installation is on Linux).

Cheers Duncan.

> Be careful:  the installed list of functions differs slightly from 
> platform to platform.  For example, on Windows there's a function 
> choose.dir in the utils package, but I don't think this exists on Unix.

Good point. However as I am in control of the R snippets I display on
the web pages and the highlighting file/list, I can add the odd thing
that Brian Ripley's findfuns function doesn't list because of platform
differences.

What I wanted to avoid was having to add functions to my key word list
each time I wrote another page on the site that used a new R snippet. As
it is early days, I'd probably spend about as much time adding functions
to the keyword list as writing pages for the site - which would put me
of a bit and slow me down. At least now I only have to add the odd
function missed.

> 
> The list also varies from version to version, so if you could manage to 
> run some code in the user's installed R to generate the list on the fly, 
> you'd get the most accurate list.

Yes. I'm planning on wrapping findfuns into a little R script that
searches additional packages that I'll use, and that will update the
packages before compiling the list. I can then run this script
periodically in R to update the list, as R is updated etc.

> 
> Duncan Murdoch

Many thanks for your reply,

All the best,

G

> 
> > 
> >> Here is a reasonable shot:
> >>
> >> findfuns <- function(x) {
> >>      if(require(x, character.only=TRUE)) {
> >>         env <- paste("package", x, sep=":")
> >>         nm <- ls(env, all=TRUE)
> >>         nm[unlist(lapply(nm, function(n) exists(n, where=env,
> >>                                                mode="function",
> >>                                                inherits=FALSE)))]
> >>      } else character(0)
> >> }
> >> pkgs <- dir(.Library)
> >> z <-  lapply(pkgs, findfuns)
> >> names(z) <- pkgs
> > 
> > Excellent, that works just fine for me. I can edit out certain packages
> > that I don't expect to use, before formatting as desired. I can also use
> > this function on a library of packages that I use regularly and will be
> > using in the web pages.
> > 
> >> I don't understand your desired format, but
> >>
> >> write(sQuote(sort(unique(unlist(z)))), "")
> > 
> > I wanted a single string "...", with entries enclosed in "''" and
> > separated by "," (this is to go in a PHP array). I can generate such a
> > string from your z, above, as follows:
> > 
> > paste(sQuote(sort(unique(unlist(z)), decreasing = TRUE)), 
> >       collapse = ", ")
> > 
> >> gives a single-column quoted list.  It does include internal functions, 
> >> operators, S3 methods ... so you probably want to edit it.
> > 
> > Once again, thank you.
> > 
> > All the best
> > 
> > Gav
> > 
> >>
> >> On Sat, 6 Jan 2007, Gavin Simpson wrote:
> >>
> >>> Dear List,
> >>>
> >>> I'm building an R syntax highlighting file for GeSHi [*] for a website I
> >>> am currently putting together. The syntax file needs a list of keywords
> >>> to highlight. How can I generate a list of all the functions in a base R
> >>> installation?
> >>>
> >>> Ideally the list would be formatted like this:
> >>>
> >>> "'fun1', 'fun2', 'fun3'"
> >>>
> >>> when printed to the screen so I can copy and paste it into the syntax
> >>> file.
> >>>
> >>> I'm sure this has been asked before, but I stupidly didn't save that
> >>> email and I couldn't come up with a suitable query parameter for
> >>> Jonathan Baron's search site to return results before timing out.
> >>>
> >>> Thanks in advance,
> >>>
> >>> Gav
> >>>
> 
-- 
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Gavin Simpson                     [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522
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