[R] Need online version of R help pages

[Paul]

John McKown <john.archie.mckown <at> gmail.com> writes:
>On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 9:43 AM, Paul <Paul.Domaskis <at> gmail.com>
>wrote:
> 
> http://www.tutorialspoint.com/execute_r_online.php

John, I appreciate the pointer.  I wish the post quoted below had
made it to the mailing list, as I could have saved you the trouble of
trying to seek a solution on my behalf.  I'm quite happy using vim
and in fact consider it to be my right hand (even though I don't dive
under the hood much).  So this post was really about getting around
the broken cygwin help facility for R rather than editing.  Also,
at work, we have to keep the work on-site.

For those unfortunate enough to have no option but to use cygwin's R,
here is the posting re. a workaround to the broken help facility,
posted via nabble (which probably explains why it didn't make it to
the mailing list):

> Sent: April-16-15 5:51 PM
> Subject: Re: Need online version of R help pages
> 
> I was able to get the help info for many of the commands from the
> link for "The R Reference Index" at
> http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html. 
> 
> However, I found that I could also get help from the R prompt via 
> 
>    help(myHelpTopic,help_type="html") 
> 
> To make that work, I needed options(browser="cygstart") in
> ~/.Rprofile. 
> 
> Very puzzling to a non-web-developer like myself: The URL for the
> help content is (for example)
> http://127.0.0.1:16086/library/stats/html/reshape.html.  This is a
> loop-back address.  I did *not* see any file named reshape.html in
> subdirectory library/stats/html/reshape.html when I went to
> R.home(). 
> 
> I thought that perhaps the file was being composed on the fly.
> However, I was under the distinct impression that my account did not
> have the ability to set up servers (and I assume that the page that
> is composed on the fly must be served out by a server).