Documentation

Usage

help(topic, offline = FALSE, package = c(.packages(), .Autoloaded),
     lib.loc = .lib.loc)
?topic

Arguments

topic a name or character string on which documentation is sought (but not a variable containing a character string!).
offline a logical indicating whether documentation should be displayed on-line to the screen (the default) or hardcopy of it should be produced.
package a name or character vector giving the packages to look into for documentation. By default, all packages in the search path are used.
lib.loc A character vector of directory names of R libraries. Defaults to all libraries currently known.

Description

These functions provide access to documentation. Documentation on a topic with name name (typically, an R object or a data set) can be printed with either help(name) or ?name. In the case of unary and binary operators and control-flow special forms, the name may need to be be quoted.

If offline is TRUE, hardcopy of the documentation is produced by running the LaTeX version of the help page through latex (note that LaTeX 2e is needed) and dvips. Depending on your dvips configuration, hardcopy will be sent to the printer or saved in a file. If the programs are in non-standard locations and hence were not found at compile time, you need to set the environment variables LATEX and DVIPS appropriately. The appearance of the output can be customized through a file `Rhelp.cfg' somewhere in your LaTeX search path.

See Also

help.start() which opens the HTML version of the R Manual; library() for listing available packages and the user-level objects they contain; data() for listing available data sets; methods().

See prompt() to get a prototype for writing help pages of private packages.

Examples

help()
help(help)		# the same

help(lapply)
?lapply			# the same

help("for")		# or ?"for", but the quotes are needed
?"+"

help(package = stepfun)	# get help even when it's not present

data()			# list all available data sets
?women			# information about data set "women"

topi <- "women"
help(topi) ##--> Error: No documentation for `topi'


[Package Contents]