apropos                 package:base                 R Documentation

Find Objects by (Partial) Name

Description:

     `apropos' returns a character vector 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:

     If `mode != "any"' only those objects which are of mode `mode' are
     considered. If `where' is `TRUE', the positions in the search list
     are returned as the 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=TRUE) # numbers with these names
     find(lm, num=TRUE, 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,}$")
     table(nchar(apropos("^.{8,}$")))

