In R, one very neat feature is that the source code of functions is accessible as objects in the workspace.
Thus, if I wanted to know the source code of, for example, grep()
I can simply type grep
into the console and read the code.
Similarly, I can read the documentation for grep
by typing ?grep
into the console.
Question: How can I get the source code for the documentation of a function? In other words, where do I find the .rd files?
I find studying the source of well-written code an excellent way of learning the idioms. Now I want to study how to write documentation for some very specific cases. I have not been able to find the documentation files for any of the base R functions in my R installation. Perhaps I have been looking in the wrong place.
It seems you can extract the Rd sources from an installed R. I'm using R-devel (2011-09-05 r56942).
Get the database of Rd for the base package.
Search for "grep.Rd" in the names of the Rd DB, for example:
Get just the Rd object for grep.
There are tools for getting the components from the Rd objects, so you can refine searching to keywords or name, see examples in ?Rd_db and try this.