[R] Convert "RDX" and "RDB" to ASCII format?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 13/09/2011 2:28 PM, Henri Mone wrote:
> Dear R users and experts,
>
> I need to modify an exisiting R function from a package. The function/
> variable is inside a namespace and I have problems accessing it.
> I only need to get access to to corresponding sourcecode. I localised
> the "RDX" and "RDB" files. But it seems to be a binary format.
> How can I convert it to an ASCII format to open  and extract the code
> from a text editio?

If you are modifying a package, you should work on the source code, not 
the binary code.  Use

download.packages("foo", destdir="somewhere", type="source")

to download a .tar.gz file containing the source.  Then use "tar zxvf 
foo..." outside of R to extract the files.

Alternatively, just load the package and print the function definitions 
to cut and paste into a file.  But this will generally lose the comments 
and helpful formatting.

Duncan Murdoch