packageDescription {utils} | R Documentation

## Package Description

### Description

Parses and returns the ‘`DESCRIPTION`’ file of a package.

### Usage

    packageDescription(pkg, lib.loc = NULL, fields = NULL, drop = TRUE,
                       encoding = "")

### Arguments

`pkg` | a character string with the package name.
`lib.loc` | a character vector of directory names of R libraries, or `NULL`. The default value of `NULL` corresponds to all libraries currently known. If the default is used, the loaded packages are searched before the libraries.
`fields` | a character vector giving the tags of fields to return (if other fields occur in the file they are ignored).
`drop` | If `TRUE` and the length of `fields` is 1, then a single character string with the value of the respective field is returned instead of an object of class `"packageDescription"`.
`encoding` | If there is an `Encoding` field, what re-encoding should be attempted? If `NA`, no re-encoding.

### Details

A package will not be ‘found’ unless it has a ‘`DESCRIPTION`’ file which contains a valid `Version` field. Different warnings are given when no package directory is found and when there is a suitable directory but no valid ‘`DESCRIPTION`’ file.

### Value

If a ‘`DESCRIPTION`’ file for the given package is found and can successfully be read, `packageDescription` returns an object of class `"packageDescription"`, which is a named list with the values of the (given) fields as elements and the tags as names, unless `drop = TRUE`.
If parsing the ‘`DESCRIPTION`’ file was not successful, it returns a named list of `NA`s with the field tags as names if `fields` is not null, and `NA` otherwise.

### See Also

`read.dcf`

### Examples

    packageDescription("stats")
    packageDescription("stats", fields = c("Package", "Version"))

    packageDescription("stats", fields = "Version")
    packageDescription("stats", fields = "Version", drop = FALSE)

[Package utils version 2.1.1 Index]