promptData {utils}

R Documentation

Generate a Shell for Documentation of Data Sets

Description

Generates a shell of documentation for a data set.

Usage

promptData(object, filename = NULL, name = NULL)

Arguments

object	an R object to be documented as a data set.
filename	usually, a connection or a character string giving the name of the file to which the documentation shell should be written. The default corresponds to a file whose name is name followed by ".Rd". Can also be NA (see below).
name	a character string specifying the name of the object.

Details

Unless filename is NA, a documentation shell for object is written to the file specified by filename, and a message about this is given.

If filename is NA, a list-style representation of the documentation shell is created and returned. Writing the shell to a file amounts to cat(unlist(x), file = filename, sep = "\n"), where x is the list-style representation.

Currently, only data frames are handled explicitly by the code.

Value

If filename is NA, a list-style representation of the documentation shell. Otherwise, the name of the file written to is returned invisibly.

Warning

This function is still experimental. Both interface and value might change in future versions. In particular, it may be preferable to use a character string naming the data set and optionally a specification of where to look for it instead of using object/name as we currently do. This would be different from prompt, but consistent with other prompt-style functions in package methods, and also allow prompting for data set documentation without explicitly having to load the data set.

See Also

prompt

Examples

promptData(sunspots)
unlink("sunspots.Rd")

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