promptPackage {utils}

R Documentation

Generate a Shell for Documentation of a Package

Description

Generates a shell of documentation for an installed or source package.

Usage

promptPackage(package, lib.loc = NULL, filename = NULL,
              name = NULL, final = FALSE)

Arguments

package	the name of an installed or source package to be documented.
lib.loc	a character vector describing the location of R library trees to search through, or NULL. The default value of NULL corresponds to all libraries currently known. For a source package this should specify the parent directory of the package's sources.
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 help topic, typically of the form <pkg>-package.
final	a logical value indicating whether to attempt to create a usable version of the help topic, rather than just a shell.

Details

Unless filename is NA, a documentation shell for package 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.

If final is TRUE, the generated documentation will not include the place-holder slots for manual editing, it will be usable as-is. In most cases a manually edited file is preferable (but final = TRUE is certainly less work).

Value

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

See Also

prompt

Examples

filename <- tempfile()
promptPackage("utils", filename = filename)
file.show(filename)
unlink(filename)

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