How to Write Contents of Help to a File from Within R

How to write contents of help to a file from within R?

Looks like the two functions you would need are tools:::Rd2txt and utils:::.getHelpFile. This prints the help file to the console, but you may need to fiddle with the arguments to get it to write to a file in the way you want.

For example:

hs <- help(survey)
tools:::Rd2txt(utils:::.getHelpFile(as.character(hs)))

Since these functions aren't currently exported, I would not recommend you rely on them for any production code. It would be better to use them as a guide to create your own stable implementation.

Write lines of text to a file in R

fileConn<-file("output.txt")
writeLines(c("Hello","World"), fileConn)
close(fileConn)

writing contents of list to one file in R

Your proposed output looks like the standard printed output, so you might want to just take the approach of capturing the printed output to a file. One simple way is to use the sink function, then have your lapply print the summaries. Or you could use capture.output and save the results yourself (if you want to modify or check anything before saving).

If those are not suficcient then look at the code for the print function that is generating the output and see if you can modify that to put the information into a file. It looks like the summary function on a data frame returns a table of character strings, so print.table would be the place to start.

writing data to a file in R

You want ?connections.

For example, from the help for ?file:

 zz <- file("ex.data", "w")  # open an output file connection
 cat("TITLE extra line", "2 3 5 7", "", "11 13 17", file = zz, sep = "\n")
 cat("One more line\n", file = zz)
 close(zz)
 readLines("ex.data")

[1] "TITLE extra line" "2 3 5 7" "" "11 13 17"

[5] "One more line"

Clean up:

 unlink("ex.data")

See ?cat, ?writeLines, ?writeBin, and several others in the See Also section of the ?connections help page.

You can also append with write.table, either with its append argument or by writing to an open connection.

In R, How to write from a list to file with a set amount of elements on each line?

It can be done with cat and gsub. unlist the list, paste them into a single string, insert nextline (\n) at every block of 'n' digits with spaces, and use cat to write into console

cat(gsub("\\s*((\\d+\\s+){1,4}\\d+)", "\\1\n", 
        paste(unlist(ls), collapse="\t")), '\n')
#1  2   3   4   5
#6  7   8   9   10
#11 12  13  14  15
#16 17  18  19  20
#21 22  23

or write to a file

cat(gsub("\\s*((\\d+\\s+){1,4}\\d+)", "\\1\n",
      paste(unlist(ls), collapse="\t")), '\n', file = 'file1.txt')

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If it is a complex data with scientific notation etc. we could split into a list and then append NA at the end for those elements with less number of elements

v1 <- unlist(ls)
lst1 <- split(v1, (seq_along(v1)-1) %/% 4 + 1)
mat1 <-  do.call(rbind, lapply(lst1, `length<-`, max(lengths(lst1))))
write(mat1, 'file2.txt')

R print object to file

Yes, you can use sink() prior to and after your print. The first call contains the path to your output file.

In your case:

sink(file.path(output_dir, "linear_model_output.txt"))
print(summary(lin_model))
sink()

R: Print list to a text file

Not tested, but it should work (edited after comments)

lapply(mylist, write, "test.txt", append=TRUE, ncolumns=1000)

How do I write all the printed items in .txt file as an output in R

I would check the sink() function.
You can find some information here

http://www.statmethods.net/interface/io.html

You can setup to which file you want to write, and then you can use cat() to output information. You can even have output sent to the file and to the console.

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