[R] R 3.2, Mac 10.10.3 : help.search showing error

[David Winsemius]

On Jun 13, 2015, at 7:41 AM, Ramnik Bansal wrote:

> Getting following error in using help.search
> 
>> utils::help.search("linear models")
> Error in help(db[i, "topic"], package = db[i, "Package"], lib.loc = lib,  :
>  'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or reserved word

I first tried this in a Mac running the SL version for R 3.1.2 and did not get this error. I updated my Mavericks laptop to R 3.2.0 and can now reproduce this error. It does not seem to depend on having a space in the argument. It seems to be thrown by this segment of code in the `help()`-function:

   ischar <- tryCatch(is.character(topic) && length(topic) == 
       1L, error = identity)
   if (inherits(ischar, "error")) 
       ischar <- FALSE
   if (!ischar) {
       reserved <- c("TRUE", "FALSE", "NULL", "Inf", "NaN", 
           "NA", "NA_integer_", "NA_real_", "NA_complex_", "NA_character_")
       stopic <- deparse(substitute(topic))
       if (!is.name(substitute(topic)) && !stopic %in% reserved) 
           stop("'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or reserved word")

If gone through the `help.search` function code and cannot find where the `help` function is actually called. This seems unlikely to be a Mac-specific problem.

> 
> 
>> example(help.search)
> 
> hlp.sr> help.search("linear models")    # In case you forgot how to fit
> linear
> Error in help(db[i, "topic"], package = db[i, "Package"], lib.loc = lib,  :
>  'topic' should be a name, length-one character vector or reserved word
> 
> 
> How to sort this?
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA