promptData {utils} | R Documentation

## Generate a Shell for Documentation of Data Sets

### Description

Generates a shell of documentation for a data set.

### Usage

    promptData(object, filename = NULL, name = NULL)

### Arguments

`object` | an R object to be documented as a data set.
`filename` | usually, a connection or a character string giving the name of the file to which the documentation shell should be written. The default corresponds to a file whose name is `name` followed by `".Rd"`. Can also be `NA` (see below).
`name` | a character string specifying the name of the object.

### Details

Unless `filename` is `NA`, a documentation shell for `object` is written to the file specified by `filename`, and a message about this is given.

If `filename` is `NA`, a list-style representation of the documentation shell is created and returned. Writing the shell to a file amounts to `cat(unlist(x), file = filename, sep = "\n")`, where `x` is the list-style representation.

Currently, only data frames are handled explicitly by the code.

### Value

If `filename` is `NA`, a list-style representation of the documentation shell. Otherwise, the name of the file written to is returned invisibly.

### Warning

This function is still experimental. Both interface and value might change in future versions. In particular, it may be preferable to use a character string naming the data set and optionally a specification of where to look for it instead of using `object`/`name` as we currently do. This would be different from `prompt`, but consistent with other prompt-style functions in package methods, and also allow prompting for data set documentation without explicitly having to load the data set.

### See Also

`prompt`

### Examples

    data(sunspots, package="stats")
    promptData(sunspots)
    unlink("sunspots.Rd")

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