datasets: Information on Data Sets in Packages

In friendly/vcdExtra: 'vcd' Extensions and Additions

Information on Data Sets in Packages

Description

The data function is used both to load data sets from packages, and give a display of the names and titles of data sets in one or more packages, however it does not return a result that can be easily used to get additional information about the nature of data sets in packages.

The datasets() function is designed to produce a more useful summary display of data sets in one or more packages. It extracts the class and dimension information (dim or codelength) of each item, and formats these to provide additional descriptors.

Usage

datasets(package, 
        allClass=FALSE, 
        incPackage=length(package) > 1,
        maxTitle=NULL)

Arguments

package	a character vector giving the package(s) to look in
allClass	a logical variable. Include all classes of the item (TRUE) or just the last class (FALSE)?
incPackage	include the package name in result?
maxTitle	maximum length of data set Title

Details

The requested packages must be installed, and are silently loaded in order to extract class and size information.

Value

A data.frame whose rows correspond to data sets found in package.

The columns (for a single package) are:

Item	data set name, a character variable
class	class, the object class of the data set, typically one of "data.frame", "table", "array" ...
dim	an abbreviation of the dimensions of the data set, in a form like "36x3" for a data.frame or matrix with 36 rows and 3 columns.
Title	data set title

Note

In Rmd documents, 'datasets("package") |> knitr::kable()' can be used to create a more pleasing display.

Author(s)

Michael Friendly, with R-help from Curt Seeliger

See Also

data, kable

Examples

datasets("vcdExtra")
# datasets(c("vcd", "vcdExtra"))
datasets("datasets", maxTitle=50)

# just list dataset names in a package
datasets("vcdExtra")[,"Item"]
datasets("vcd")[,"Item"]

friendly/vcdExtra documentation built on Aug. 30, 2023, 6:21 a.m.