| packageDescription {base} | R Documentation |
Parses and returns the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file of a package.
packageDescription(pkg, lib.loc = NULL, fields = NULL, drop=TRUE)
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". |
If a ‘DESCRIPTION’ 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 NAs
with the field tags as names if fields is not null, and
NA otherwise.
packageDescription("stats")
packageDescription("stats", fields = c("Package", "Version"))
packageDescription("stats", fields = "Version")
packageDescription("stats", fields = "Version", drop = FALSE)