hiding personal functions in R

Question

I have a few convenience functions in my .Rprofile, such as this handy function for returning the size of objects in memory. Sometimes I like to clean out my workspace witho

Answer 1

I find that often my R environment gets cluttered with various objects when I'm creating or debugging a function. I wanted a way to efficiently keep the environment free of these objects while retaining personal functions.

The simple function below was my solution. It does 2 things: 1) deletes all non-function objects that do not begin with a capital letter and then 2) saves the environment as an RData file

(requires the R.oo package)

cleanup=function(filename="C:/mymainR.RData"){  
library(R.oo)  
# create a dataframe listing all personal objects
everything=ll(envir=1)
#get the objects that are not functions
nonfunction=as.vector(everything[everything$data.class!="function",1])
#nonfunction objects that do not begin with a capital letter should be deleted
trash=nonfunction[grep('[[:lower:]]{1}',nonfunction)]
remove(list=trash,pos=1)
#save the R environment
save.image(filename)
print(paste("New, CLEAN R environment saved in",filename))
}

In order to use this function 3 rules must always be kept:
1) Keep all data external to R.
2) Use names that begin with a capital letter for non-function objects that I want to keep permanently available.
3) Obsolete functions must be removed manually with rm.

Obviously this isn't a general solution for everyone...and potentially disastrous if you don't live by rules #1 and #2. But it does have numerous advantages: a) fear of my data getting nuked by cleanup() keeps me disciplined about using R exclusively as a processor and not a database, b) my main R environment is so small I can backup as an email attachment, c) new functions are automatically saved (I don't have to manually manage a list of personal functions) and d) all modifications to preexisting functions are retained. Of course the best advantage is the most obvious one...I don't have to spend time doing ls() and reviewing objects to decide whether they should be rm'd.

Even if you don't care for the specifics of my system, the "ll" function in R.oo is very useful for this kind of thing. It can be used to implement just about any set of clean up rules that fit your personal programming style.

Patrick Mohr