R: Get textual help on function or function arguments

descFun {svMisc} | R Documentation

## Get textual help on function or function arguments

### Description

Textual help on functions or their arguments is extracted for text online help for a given function. By default, all arguments from the online help are returned for `descArgs()`. If the file contains help for several functions, one probably gets also some irrelevant information. Use of 'args' to limit result is strongly encouraged.

### Usage

    descFun(fun, package, lib.loc = NULL)
    descArgs(fun, args = NULL, package = NULL, lib.loc = NULL)

### Arguments

`fun` | a character string with the name of a function (several functions accepted for `descFun()`.
`args` | either `NULL` (by default) to return the description of all arguments from the corresponding man page, or a character vector with names of the arguments to search for.
`package` | a character string with the name of the package that contains `fun`, or `NULL` for searching in all loaded packages.
`lib.loc` | a character vector of directory names of R libraries, or `NULL`. The default value of `NULL` corresponds to all libraries currently known. If the default is used, the loaded packages are searched before the libraries.

### Value

A string with the description of the function or of its arguments. If the man page is not found, a vector of empty strings is returned. Empty strings are also returned for arguments that are not found in the man page.

### Author(s)

Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean@sciviews.org>

### See Also

`completion`

### Examples

    descFun("ls", "base")
    descFun("library", "base")
    descFun("descFun", "svMisc")
    descFun("descArgs")
    descArgs("ls")
    descArgs("library", args = c("package", "pos"))

[Package svMisc version 0.9-70 Index]