How to specify the package when looking up a help reference page for a function?

emacs, ess, package, r

Solution

Use the `package=` argument to `help`:

help("count", package="plyr")

Problem

How does one look up the help manual page for a function and specify the package in R? For example, count appears in both seqinr and plyr. If I want to look up count in plyr, what's the command? I've tried a few obvious (but wrong) guesses such as "?plyr::count" EDIT: When I do ?count, I get the following message: ``` Help on topic 'count' was found in the following packages: Package Library plyr /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/2.15/Resources/library seqinr /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/2.15/Resources/library ``` When I do ?plyr::count, I get: ``` No documentation for 'plyr::count' in specified packages and libraries: you could try '??plyr::count' ``` When I do ?plyr:::count, I get: ``` No documentation for 'plyr:::count' in specified packages and libraries: you could try '??plyr:::count' ``` Adding two question marks also gets me a no documentation found error as well. Looking up help for non-ambiguous funcitons is working fine (e.g. ?plot) This is with R 2.15.0 on OSX running in emacs + ESS.

Original source