Show an Rd file in viewer from Rstudio

Question

I have documentation for functions and datasets in a project folder. In a documentation folder, I have .Rd files for all the datasets. I'd like the user to be able to call a custom help function and launch the .Rd file in the viewer as is done automatically when the file is compiled from the file editor. Is it possible to do this?

Answer 1

I don't quite understand why you want to do this, but it's possible. What you should do is just put your datasets into a package, document them there, and then users get easy access to them.

But if you really want to avoid that for some reason, here's how:

library(magrittr)
library(htmltools)
library(tools)
f <- "some.Rd"   # Set a filename for an Rd file here
f %>% 
  parse_Rd %>% 
  (function(x) capture.output(Rd2HTML(x))) %>% 
  HTML %>% 
  browsable