[R] printing html help to the terminal

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 04/08/2010 2:40 PM, Michael Lachmann wrote:
> I just tried it under OSX and linux, and both get stuck. Maybe R on windows
> forks the R help server?
>   

It doesn't fork, but it might run in another thread.

> But what you suggested works perfectly. Thanks!
>
> Do you by chance know if there was something equivalent in R 2.10.x and/or
> 2.9.x
>   

I believe similar code will work in 2.10.x, which was when the new help 
system was introduced.  The .getHelpFile function isn't there, but I 
believe if you just
copy it from 2.11.1 into 2.10.x, it will work.

In 2.9.x you actually have copies of the HTML files on disk.  You can 
probably play with unclass(?topic) to construct the path to one.  (I'm 
on a relatively new machine here, with nothing older than 2.10.1 installed.)

Duncan Murdoch

>
> Duncan Murdoch-2 wrote:
> > 
> > On 04/08/2010 12:44 PM, Michael Lachmann wrote:
> >> I'm trying to get help to print the help pages in html format to the
> >> terminal. This is in order to be able to see the html help files
> >> remotely.
> >>
> >> If I do
> >> printURL = function(file) {a=readLines(url(file));cat(a,sep="\n")}
> >> options(browser=printURL)
> >> options(help_type="html")
> >>
> >> then invoking help with
> >> ?print
> >>
> >> gets stuck. I think what happens is that the web server run by R that
> >> allows
> >> one to read help will not work as long as R is waiting for the function
> >> to
> >> complete. Thus, if I run a second R session, and try to read the help
> >> files
> >> that one session produces from the other, I have no problems.
> >>
> >> I also tried
> >> options(browser="wget -O- ")
> >>
> >> But again, while R is waiting for the command to complete, the web server
> >> is
> >> dead.
> >>
> >> Is there a better way to accomplish this?
> >>
> >>   
> > 
> > What you're doing should work, and it works for me in 2.11.1 in 
> > Windows.  Not sure why it doesn't work for you.
> > 
> > A more direct way to get the HTML output for a help file is to use the 
> > internal utilities that R uses.  You get the help page using
> > 
> > page <- utils:::.getHelpFile(?print)
> > 
> > (remember to keep that question mark!), and use
> > 
> > tools::Rd2HTML(page)
> > 
> > to turn it into HTML.
> > 
> > 
> > Duncan Murdoch
> > 
> > ______________________________________________
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> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide
> > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> > 
> > 
>