[R] Need online version of R help pages

[Henrik Bengtsson]

I don't want to rub it in more, but whatever dark forces are upon you,
they'd have a hard time preventing you from installing R to your user
account, which requires minimal privileges(*).

Just wanted to make sure you're aware of your options

/Henrik

(*) The R Windows installer detects and adjusts for this
automatically. The only things I can think of that prevents this
approach is that the computer is completely disconnected from the
world,  users have extremely limited disk space, the user account is
wiped at every login, ... what else?  Also, AFAIK, the only thing you
miss out on is that R won't be added to the Windows Registry meaning
.RData files are not associated with R, but that's a very low price to
pay considered it's a better option than Cygwin.

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 8:24 AM, Paul <Paul.Domaskis at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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).
>
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