Extract Variable Labels from Rd Documentation

Reads the variable descriptions out of the \describe section of a documented dataset and returns them as a named character vector, the names being the variable names. This turns documentation that already exists into labels usable in tables, plots and codebooks, instead of maintaining the same descriptions a second time in the code.

Usage

rdLabels(dataName, package)

Arguments

dataName

character string, the name of the dataset.

package

character string, the name of the package holding the dataset.

Value

a named character vector of variable descriptions, the names being the variable names.

Details

The Rd database is read with tools::Rd_db() and searched recursively for the first \describe section, from which all \item{var}{description} entries are taken. Only that first section is read: on a page documenting more than one dataset, the labels of the first one are returned.

Descriptions are returned as written in the Rd file, with whitespace and line breaks collapsed to single spaces. Rd markup inside a description, such as \code{} or \eqn{}, contributes its content without the surrounding command.

The package must be installed, as the documentation is read from the installed Rd database rather than from the sources.

See also

tools::Rd_db()

Other pkg.funinfo: funArgs(), funCalls(), funKeywords(), funList(), rdTitle()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
rdLabels("Pizza", "bedrock")
## price               temperature         delivery_min
## "Price of the ..."  "Temperature ..."   "Delivery ..."
} # }