Inspecting packages

Introduction#

Packages build on base R. This document explains how to inspect installed packages and their functionality. Related Docs: Installing packages

Remarks#

The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) is the primary package repository.

View package information

To retrieve information about dplyr package and its functions’ descriptions:

help(package = "dplyr")

No need to load the package first.

View package’s built-in data sets

To see built-in data sets from package dplyr

 data(package = "dplyr")

No need to load the package first.

List a package’s exported functions

To get the list of functions within package dplyr, we first must load the package:

library(dplyr)
ls("package:dplyr")

View Package Version

Conditions: package should be at least installed. If not loaded in the current session, not a problem.

  ## Checking package version which was installed at past or 
  ## installed currently but not loaded in the current session

  packageVersion("seqinr")
  # [1] ‘3.3.3’
  packageVersion("RWeka")
  # [1] ‘0.4.29’

View Loaded packages in Current Session

To check the list of loaded packages

search()

(.packages())