help Documentation

Description

help is the primary interface to the help systems.

Usage

help(topic, package = NULL, lib.loc = NULL,
     verbose = getOption("verbose"),
     try.all.packages = getOption("help.try.all.packages"),
     help_type = getOption("help_type"))

Arguments

topic	usually, a name or character string specifying the topic for which help is sought. A character string (enclosed in explicit single or double quotes) is always taken as naming a topic. If the value of topic is a length-one character vector the topic is taken to be the value of the only element. Otherwise topic must be a name or a reserved word (if syntactically valid) or character string. See ‘Details’ for what happens if this is omitted.
package	a name or character vector giving the packages to look into for documentation, or NULL. By default, all packages whose namespaces are loaded are used. To avoid a name being deparsed use e.g. (pkg_ref) (see the examples).
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. This is not used for HTML help (see ‘Details’).
verbose	logical; if TRUE, the file name is reported.
try.all.packages	logical; see Note.
help_type	character string: the type of help required. Possible values are "text", "html" and "pdf". Case is ignored, and partial matching is allowed.

Details

The following types of help are available:

• Plain text help

• HTML help pages with hyperlinks to other topics, shown in a browser by browseURL.
  (On Unix-alikes, where possible an existing browser window is re-used: the macOS GUI uses its own browser window.)

  If for some reason HTML help is unavailable (see startDynamicHelp), plain text help will be used instead.

• For help only, typeset as PDF – see the section on ‘Offline help’.

On Unix-alikes:

The ‘factory-fresh’ default is text help except from the macOS GUI, which uses HTML help displayed in its own browser window.

On Windows:

The default for the type of help is selected when R is installed – the ‘factory-fresh’ default is HTML help.

The rendering of text help will use directional quotes in suitable locales (UTF-8 and single-byte Windows locales): sometimes the fonts used do not support these quotes so this can be turned off by setting options(useFancyQuotes = FALSE).

topic is not optional: if it is omitted R will give

• If a package is specified, (text or, in interactive use only, HTML) information on the package, including hints/links to suitable help topics.

• If lib.loc only is specified, a (text) list of available packages.

• Help on help itself if none of the first three arguments is specified.

Some topics need to be quoted (by backticks) or given as a character string. These include those which cannot syntactically appear on their own such as unary and binary operators, function and control-flow reserved words (including if, else for, in, repeat, while, break and next). The other reserved words can be used as if they were names, for example TRUE, NA and Inf.

If multiple help files matching topic are found, in interactive use a menu is presented for the user to choose one: in batch use the first on the search path is used. (For HTML help the menu will be an HTML page, otherwise a graphical menu if possible if getOption("menu.graphics") is true, the default.)

Note that HTML help does not make use of lib.loc: it will always look first in the loaded packages and then along .libPaths().

Offline help

Typeset documentation is produced by running the LaTeX version of the help page through pdflatex: this will produce a PDF file.

The appearance of the output can be customized through a file ‘Rhelp.cfg’ somewhere in your LaTeX search path: this will be input as a LaTeX style file after Rd.sty. Some environment variables are consulted, notably R_PAPERSIZE (via getOption("papersize")) and R_RD4PDF (see ‘Making manuals’ in the ‘R Installation and Administration’ manual).

If there is a function offline_help_helper in the workspace or further down the search path it is used to do the typesetting, otherwise the function of that name in the utils namespace (to which the first paragraph applies). It should accept at least two arguments, the name of the LaTeX file to be typeset and the type (which is nowadays ignored). It accepts a third argument, texinputs, which will give the graphics path when the help document contains figures, and will otherwise not be supplied.

Note

Unless lib.loc is specified explicitly, the loaded packages are searched before those in the specified libraries. This ensures that if a library is loaded from a library not in the known library trees, then the help from the loaded library is used. If lib.loc is specified explicitly, the loaded packages are not searched.

If this search fails and argument try.all.packages is TRUE and neither packages nor lib.loc is specified, then all the packages in the known library trees are searched for help on topic and a list of (any) packages where help may be found is displayed (with hyperlinks for help_type = "html"). NB: searching all packages can be slow, especially the first time (caching of files by the OS can expedite subsequent searches dramatically).

References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

See Also

? for shortcuts to help topics.

help.search() or ?? for finding help pages on a vague topic; help.start() which opens the HTML version of the R help pages; library() for listing available packages and the help objects they contain; data() for listing available data sets; methods().

Use prompt() to get a prototype for writing help pages of your own package.

Examples

help()
help(help)              # the same

help(lapply)

help("for")             # or ?"for", but quotes/backticks are needed

try({# requires working TeX installation:
 help(dgamma, help_type = "pdf")
 ## -> nicely formatted pdf -- including math formula -- for help(dgamma):
 system2(getOption("pdfviewer"), "dgamma.pdf", wait = FALSE)
})

help(package = "splines") # get help even when package is not loaded

topi <- "women"
help(topi)

try(help("bs", try.all.packages = FALSE)) # reports not found (an error)
help("bs", try.all.packages = TRUE)       # reports can be found
                                          # in package 'splines'

## For programmatic use:
topic <- "family"; pkg_ref <- "stats"
help((topic), (pkg_ref))