news {utils}R Documentation

Build and Query R or Package News Information

Description

Build and query the news for R or add-on packages.

Usage

news(query, package = "R", lib.loc = NULL, format = NULL, 
     reader = NULL, db = NULL)

Arguments

query an expression for selecting news entries
package a character string giving the name of an installed add-on package, or "R".
lib.loc a character vector of directory names of R libraries, or NULL. The default value of NULL corresponds to all libraries currently known.
format Not yet used.
reader Not yet used.
db a news db obtained from news().

Details

If package is "R" (default), readNEWS in package tools is used to build a news db from the R ‘NEWS’ file. Otherwise, if the given add-on package can be found in the given libraries and has a ‘NEWS’ file, it is attempted to read the package news in structured form. The ‘NEWS’ files in add-on packages use a variety of different formats; the default news reader should be capable to extract individual news entries from a majority of packages from the standard repositories, which use (slight variations of) the following format:

Additional formats and readers may be supported in the future.

The news db built is a character data frame inheriting from "news_db" with variables Version, Category, Date and Text, where the last contains the entry texts read, and the other variables may be NA if they were missing or could not be determined.

Using query, one can select news entries from the db. If missing or NULL, the complete db is returned. Otherwise, query should be an expression involving (a subset of) the variables Version, Category, Date and Text, and when evaluated within the db returning a logical vector with length the number of entries in the db. The entries for which evaluation gave TRUE are selected. When evaluating, Version and Date are coerced to numeric_version and Date objects, respectively, so that the comparison operators for these classes can be employed.

Value

An data frame inheriting from class "news_db".

Examples

## Build a db of all R news entries.
db <- news()
## Bug fixes with PR number in 2.9.0.
news(Version == "2.9.0" & grepl("^BUG", Category) & grepl("PR#", Text),
     db = db)
## Entries with version >= 2.8.1 (including "2.8.1 patched"):
table(news(Version >= "2.8.1", db = db)$Version)

[Package utils version 2.11.0 Index]