I would like to have a call that returns me a vector with the names of all function that I could call in the current R session. Does anybody know how to achieve this?
(I would like to check user entered variables against this vector. We had some unforseen problem with users entering e.g., c
as variable names)
UPDATE: I would like to get the function names from all packages currently loaded.
SOLUTION (half way): Based on Joris Meys tip with lsf.str()
I came up with the following function that returns a sorted vector with all currently available function names:
getFunctionNames <- function() {
loaded <- (.packages())
loaded <- paste("package:", loaded, sep ="")
return(sort(unlist(lapply(loaded, lsf.str))))
}
Bu,t see also the comments on Joris Meys' post for even better answers.
I'd use lsf.str()
as a start.
eg : x <- as.character(lsf.str("package:base"))
gives you a list of all functions in the base package. You could do add all packages you want to check against. stats
and utils
come to mind first.
EDIT : Regarding your question about currently loaded packages :
x <- unlist(sapply(search()[-1],function(x)as.character(lsf.str(x)))) see comments
pkgs <- search()
pkgs <- pkgs[grep("package:",pkgs)]
y <- unlist(sapply(pkgs,lsf.str))
does the trick.
I asked a similar Q on R-Help many moons ago (2007) and Prof. Brian Ripley provided this as a solution:
findfuns <- function(x) {
if(require(x, character.only=TRUE)) {
env <- paste("package", x, sep=":")
nm <- ls(env, all=TRUE)
nm[unlist(lapply(nm, function(n) exists(n, where=env,
mode="function",
inherits=FALSE)))]
} else character(0)
}
pkgs <- dir(.Library)
z <- lapply(pkgs, findfuns)
names(z) <- pkgs
Z <- sort(unique(unlist(z)))
Which gives output like:
> head(Z)
[1] "^" "-" "-.Date" "-.POSIXt" ":" "::"
This was for finding all the functions in packages specified by object pkgs
so you can control which packages are loaded/checked against.
A modified version that work on the currently loaded set of packages would be:
findfuns2 <- function(pkgs) {
nm <- ls(pkgs, all = TRUE)
nm[unlist(lapply(nm, function(n) exists(n, where = pkgs,
mode = "function",
inherits = FALSE)))]
if(isTRUE(all.equal(length(nm), 0)))
character(0)
else
nm
}
pkgs <- search()
pkgs <- pkgs[grep("package:", pkgs)]
z <- lapply(pkgs, findfuns2)
z <- sort(unique(unlist(z)))
head(z)