[R] Supressing printing from a function: ecdf

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Patrick Burns wrote:

> If you do:
>
> getAnywhere('summary.ecdf')
>
> you will see the 'cat' statement that is doing
> the printing that is annoying you.
>
> It seems to me that a better definition of the
> function would have an argument called something
> like 'verbose' that controlled if the 'cat' statement
> was executed.

The standard advice is to have a separate print() methods for the 
summary() method.

> I'm not sure of the best advice for the current
> situation.

Use sink(), perhaps via capture.output()?

>
>
> Patrick Burns
> patrick at burns-stat.com
> +44 (0)20 8525 0696
> http://www.burns-stat.com
> (home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")
>
> tolga.i.uzuner at jpmorgan.com wrote:
>> Dear R Users,
>> 
>> I am trying to suppress the information printed by the ecdf function during 
>> an assignment. Various alternatives have failed me so far:
>>
>> 
>>> a=summary(ecdf(rnorm(100)))["1st Qu."]
>>> 
>> Empirical CDF:    100 unique values with summary
>> 
>>> invisible(a=summary(ecdf(rnorm(100)))["1st Qu."])
>>> 
>> Empirical CDF:    100 unique values with summary
>> 
>>> (function() invisible(a=summary(ecdf(rnorm(100)))["1st Qu."])) ()
>>> 
>> Empirical CDF:    100 unique values with summary
>> 
>> It's the "Empirical CDF:    100 unique values with summary" bit that I 
>> would like to supress. Any way to achieve this result ?
>> 
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Tolga
>> 
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>
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-- 
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