R: An Etags-like Tagging Utility for R

rtags {utils} | R Documentation

## An Etags-like Tagging Utility for R

### Description

`rtags` provides etags-like indexing capabilities for R code, using R's own parser.

### Usage

    rtags(path = ".", pattern = "\\.[RrSs]$",
          recursive = FALSE,
          src = list.files(path = path, pattern = pattern,
                           full.names = TRUE,
                           recursive = recursive),
          keep.re = NULL,
          ofile = "", append = FALSE,
          verbose = getOption("verbose"))

### Arguments

`path, pattern, recursive` | Arguments passed on to `list.files` to determine the files to be tagged. By default, these are all files with extension `.R`, `.r`, `.S`, and `.s` in the current directory. These arguments are ignored if `src` is specified.
`src` | A vector of file names to be indexed.
`keep.re` | A regular expression further restricting `src` (the files to be indexed). For example, specifying `keep.re = "/R/[^/]*\\.R$"` will only retain files with extension `.R` inside a directory named `R`.
`ofile` | Passed on to `cat` as the `file` argument; typically the output file where the tags will be written (`"TAGS"` by convention). By default, the output is written to the R console (unless redirected).
`append` | Logical, indicating whether the output should overwrite an existing file, or append to it.
`verbose` | Logical. If `TRUE`, file names are echoed to the R console as they are processed.

### Details

Many text editors allow definitions of functions and other language objects to be quickly and easily located in source files through a tagging utility. This functionality requires the relevant source files to be preprocessed, producing an index (or tag) file containing the names and their corresponding locations. There are multiple tag file formats, the most popular being the vi-style ctags format and the and emacs-style etags format. Tag files in these formats are usually generated by the `ctags` and `etags` utilities respectively. Unfortunately, these programs do not recognize R code syntax. They do allow tagging of arbitrary language files through regular expressions, but this too is insufficient.

The `rtags` function is intended to be a tagging utility for R code. It parses R code files (using R's parser) and produces tags in Emacs' etags format. Support for vi-style tags is currently absent, but should not be difficult to add.

### Author(s)

Deepayan Sarkar

### References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctags, http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-intro/html_node/emacs.html#Tags

### See Also

`list.files`, `cat`

### Examples

    ## Not run:
    rtags("/path/to/src/repository",
          pattern = "[.]*\\.[RrSs]$",
          keep.re = "/R/",
          verbose = TRUE,
          ofile = "TAGS",
          append = FALSE,
          recursive = TRUE)

    ## End(Not run)

[Package utils version 3.1.2 Index]