Getting Help with R

Getting help with R is important to learning the language and getting expertise in R.

Question: How one can get help with different commands in the R Language?
Answer: There are many ways to get help with the different commands (functions). There is a built-in help facility which is similar to the man facility in Unix. For beginners to get help, the help() function or the symbol ‘?‘ (question mark only) can be used to get help with different commands.

Help Function in R

Questions: Provide some examples of getting help with different functions used in R.
Answer: To get more information on any specific command (function), for example for getting help with solve( ), lm( ), plot( ), etc., write the following commands at the prompt:

help(solve)
help(lm)
help(plot)

Question: Can one get help for special symbols, and characters in R Language?
Answer: Yes one can get help for special characters. For example;

help("[[")
help("[")
help("^")
help("$")
help("%%")

Question: What help.start() does?
Answer: The help.start( ) will launch a web browser that allows the help pages to be browsed with hyperlinks. It can be a better way to get help with different functions.

help.search Function

Question: There is help.search( ) command. For what purpose it is?
Answer: The help.search() command allows searching for help in various ways. To get what help.search( ) functions do, write this command at the prompt;

help(help.search)

Question: Provide some details about help.search( ) function and also illustrate it by providing some examples.
Answer: The help.search( ) allows for searching the help system for documentation matching a given character string in the (file) name, alias, title, concept, or keyword entries (or any combination thereof), using either fuzzy matching or regular expression matching. Names and titles of the matched help entries are displayed nicely formatted. The examples are:

help.search("linear")
help.search("linear models")
help.search("print")
help.search("cat")

? Operator

Question: How ‘?‘ can be used to get help with different functions and objects in R language?
Answer: The ‘?‘ mark can be used to get help with the Windows version of the R Language. For example;

?print
?help
?"[["
?methods
?lm

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