showMethods {methods}

R Documentation

Show all the methods for the specified function(s)

Description

Show a summary of the methods for one or more generic functions, possibly restricted to those involving specified classes.

Usage

showMethods(f=character(), where=-1, classes=NULL, includeDefs=FALSE, 
            inherited=TRUE, printTo = stdout())

Arguments

f	One or more function names. If omitted, all functions will be examined.
where	If where is supplied, the methods definition from that position will be used; otherwise, the current definition is used (which will include inherited methods that have arisen so far in the session). If f is omitted, where controls where to look for generic functions.
classes	If argument classes is supplied, it is a vector of class names that restricts the displayed results to those methods whose signatures include one or more of those classes.
includeDefs	If includeDefs is TRUE, include the definitions of the individual methods in the printout.
inherited	If inherits is TRUE, then methods that have been found by inheritance, so far in the session, will be included and marked as inherited.
printTo	The connection on which the printed information will be written. If printTo is FALSE, the output will be collected as a character vector and returned as the value of the call to showMethod. See show.

Details

The output style is different from S-Plus in that it does not show the database from which the definition comes, but can optionally include the method definitions.

Value

If printTo is FALSE, the character vector that would have been printed is returned; otherwise the value is the connection or filename.

Author(s)

John Chambers

References

The web page http://www.omegahat.org/RSMethods/index.html is the primary documentation.

The functions in this package emulate the facility for classes and methods described in Programming with Data (John M. Chambers, Springer, 1998). See this book for further details and examples.

See Also

setMethod, and GenericFunctions for other tools involving methods; show

Examples

## assuming the methods for plot
## are set up as in the documentation for setMethod,
## print (without definitions) the methods that involve
## class "track"
showMethods("plot", classes = "track")
## Not run: 
Function "plot":
x = ANY, y = track
x = track, y = missing
x = track, y = ANY
## End(Not run)

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