apropos {base}R Documentation

Find Objects by (Partial) Name

Description

apropos returns a vector of character strings giving the names of all objects in the search list matching what.

find is a different user interface to the same task as apropos.

Usage

apropos(what, where = FALSE, mode = "any")
find(what, mode = "any", numeric. = FALSE, simple.words = TRUE)

Arguments

what name of an object, or regular expression to match against
where, numeric. a logical indicating whether positions in the search list should also be returned
mode character; if not "any", only objects who's mode equals mode are searched.
simple.words logical; if TRUE, the what argument is only searched as whole only word.

Details

apropos returns a vector of character strings giving the names of all objects in the search list matching what. If mode != "any" only those objects which are of mode mode are considered. If where is TRUE, their position in the search list is returned as their names attribute.

find is a different user interface to the same task as apropos. However, by default (simple.words == TRUE), only full words are searched.

Author(s)

Kurt Hornik and Martin Maechler (May 1997).

See Also

objects for listing objects from one place, help.search for searching the help system, search for the search path.

Examples

apropos("lm")
apropos(ls)
apropos("lq")

lm <- 1:pi
find(lm)        ##> ".GlobalEnv"   "package:base"
find(lm, num=T) ## .. numbers with these names
find(lm, num=T, mode="function")# only the second one
rm(lm)

apropos(".", mode="list")

# need a DOUBLE backslash `\\' (in case you don't see it anymore)
apropos("\\[")

# everything
length(apropos("."))

# those starting with `pr'
apropos("^pr")

# the 1-letter things
apropos("^.$")
# the 1-2-letter things
apropos("^..?$")
# the 2-to-4 letter things
apropos("^.{2,4}$")

# the 8-and-more letter things
apropos("^.{8,}$")
table(nchar(apropos("^.{8,}$")))

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