readNEWS {tools}

R Documentation

Read R's NEWS file or a similar one

Description

Read R's NEWS file or a similarly formatted one. This is an experimental feature, new in R 2.4.0 and may change in several ways.

Usage

readNEWS(file = file.path(R.home(), "NEWS"), trace = FALSE,
         chop = c("first", "1", "par1", "keepAll"))
checkNEWS(file = file.path(R.home(), "NEWS"))

Arguments

file	the name of the file which the data are to be read from. Alternatively, file can be a connection, which will be opened if necessary, and can also be a complete URL. For more details, see the file argument of read.table.
trace	logical indicating if the recursive reading should be traced, i.e., print what it is doing.
chop	a character string specifying how the news entries should be chopped; chop = "keepAll" saves the full entries.

Details

readNEWS() reads a NEWS file; checkNEWS() checks for common errors in formatting. Currently it detects an incorrect number of spaces before the "o" item marker.

Value

readNEWS() returns an (S3) object of class "newsTree"; effectively a list of lists which is a tree of NEWS entries.

checkNEWS() returns TRUE if no suspected errors are found, or prints a message for each suspected error and returns FALSE.

Note that this is still experimental and may change in the future.

Examples

NEWStr  <- readNEWS(trace = TRUE)# chop = "first" ( = "first non-empty")
## keep the full NEWS entry text i.e. "no chopping":
NEWStrA <- readNEWS(chop = "keepAll")
object.size(NEWStr)
object.size(NEWStrA) ## (no chopping) ==> about double the size

str(NEWStr, max.level = 3)

str(NEWStr[[c("2.3", "2.3.1")]], max.level=2, vec.len=1)

NEWStr [[c("2.3", "2.3.1", "NEW FEATURES")]]
NEWStrA[[c("2.4", "2.4.0", "NEW FEATURES")]]

# Check the current NEWS file

stopifnot(checkNEWS())

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