apropos {utils}R Documentation

Find Objects by (Partial) Name

Description

apropos() returns a character vector giving the names of objects in the search list matching (as a regular expression) what.

find() returns where objects of a given name can be found.

Usage

apropos(what, where = FALSE, ignore.case = TRUE,
        dot_internals = FALSE, mode = "any")

find(what, mode = "any", numeric = FALSE, simple.words = TRUE)

Arguments

what

character string. For simple.words = FALSE the name of an object; otherwise a regular expression to match object names against.

where, numeric

a logical indicating whether positions in the search list should also be returned

ignore.case

logical indicating if the search should be case-insensitive, TRUE by default.

dot_internals

logical indicating if the search result should show base internal objects, FALSE by default.

mode

character; if not "any", only objects whose mode equals mode are searched.

simple.words

logical; if TRUE, the what argument is only searched as a whole word.

Details

If mode != "any" only those objects which are of mode mode are considered.

find is a different user interface for a similar task to apropos. By default (simple.words == TRUE), only whole names are matched. Unlike apropos, matching is always case-sensitive.

Unlike the default behaviour of ls, names which begin with a ‘⁠.⁠’ are included, but base ‘internal’ objects are included only when dot_internals is true.

Value

For apropos, a character vector sorted by name. For where = TRUE this has names giving the (numerical) positions on the search path.

For find, either a character vector of environment names or (for numeric = TRUE) a numerical vector of positions on the search path with names the names of the corresponding environments.

Author(s)

Originally, Kurt Hornik and Martin Maechler (May 1997).

See Also

glob2rx to convert wildcard patterns to regular expressions.

objects for listing objects from one place, help.search for searching the help system, search for the search path.

Examples

require(stats)

## Not run: apropos("lm")
apropos("GLM")                      # several
apropos("GLM", ignore.case = FALSE) # not one
apropos("lq")

cor <- 1:pi
find("cor")                         #> ".GlobalEnv"   "package:stats"
find("cor", numeric = TRUE)                     # numbers with these names
find("cor", numeric = TRUE, mode = "function")  # only the second one
rm(cor)

## Not run: apropos(".", mode = "list")  # includes many datasets

# extraction/replacement methods (need a DOUBLE backslash '\\')
apropos("\\[")

# everything % not diff-able
length(apropos("."))

# those starting with 'pr'
apropos("^pr")

# the 1-letter things
apropos("^.$")
# the 1-2-letter things
apropos("^..?$")
# the 2-to-4 letter things
apropos("^.{2,4}$")
# frequencies of 8-and-more letter things
table(nchar(apropos("^.{8,}$")))

[Package utils version 4.4.1 Index]