the ? or ?? help on plyr

[Luis Belmar-Letelier]

Hello,

I can't get the the ? or ?? help on the package, did I miss something ?

> library(plyr)
> ??plyr
No vignettes or demos or help files found with alias or concept or
title matching ‘plyr’ using regular expression matching.
> ?plyr
No documentation for ‘plyr’ in specified packages and libraries:
you could try ‘??plyr’

[Ista Zahn]

Hi Luis,

help("?") will tell you that the usage is

?topic

and that topic is "Usually, a name or character string specifying the
topic for which help is sought."

Since there is no plyr topic or function, you don't get any results from ?plyr.

You can use

help(package="plyr")

to get the package documentation.

Best,
Ista

Alternatively, a function call to ask for documentation on a
corresponding S4 method: see the section on S4 method documentation.
The calls pkg::topic and pkg:::topic are treated specially, and look
for help on topic in package pkg.

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[Timothy Bates]

For my money, Luis is spot on: It is the most obvious thing to do after
install.packages(newPackage); require(newPackage); # is
?newPackage

Getting the response "No documentation for ‘plyr’ in specified packages and libraries" explains a lot about why people need so much effortful human help using R. It should probably say

No documentation for a function called plyr. As I see this is a package, you might try help(package="plyr")

That would be helpful. Explanations that R doesn't have to help this way or that there is an additional function you can bother a list of people to discover, then remember for the times you need it once every two months are part of what is wrong with R IMHO.

Error messages should trap errors and return helpful solutions

best, tim

[Winston Chang]

For what it's worth, I opened a pull request a few weeks ago that
includes package documentation for plyr.

https://github.com/hadley/plyr/pull/90

-Winston

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[Timothy Bates]

me too
https://github.com/hadley/plyr/pulls/tbates

[David Winsemius]

This confuses me. The standard method to get help() to display an
index of functions and DESCRIPTION file and Package NEWS for a
package is:

help(package=plyr)

... and it seems that plyr conforms to that convention. Why are you
asking that plyr be packaged differently than any other package?

--
David.

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David Winsemius, MD
Alameda, CA, USA

[Brandon Hurr]

Perhaps the convention isn't really the most straightforward/user-friendly approach? 

I often find myself using ?newPackage when I forget the name/spelling/usage of a function in a package, but know which package its in. It often works, and I think it should. 

Why shouldn't it? 

 

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 5:24 AM, David Winsemius <dwins...@comcast.net> wrote:

This confuses me. The standard method to get help() to display an index of functions and  DESCRIPTION file and  Package NEWS for a package is:

help(package=plyr)

... and it seems that plyr conforms to that convention. Why are you asking that plyr be packaged differently than any other package?

--
David.

On Aug 17, 2012, at 3:18 AM, Luis Belmar-Letelier wrote:

Hello,

I can't get the the ? or ?? help on the package, did I miss something ?

> library(plyr)
> ??plyr
No vignettes or demos or help files found with alias or concept or
title matching ‘plyr’ using regular expression matching.
> ?plyr
No documentation for ‘plyr’ in specified packages and libraries:
you could try ‘??plyr’




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David Winsemius, MD
Alameda, CA, USA

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