Getting help with functions and features

R has an inbuilt help facility similar to the man facility of UNIX. To get more information on any specific named function, for example solve, the command is

help(solve)

An alternative is

?solve

For a feature specified by special characters, the argument must be enclosed in double or single quotes, making it a “character string”: This is also necessary for a few words with syntactic meaning including if, for and function.

help(”[[“)

The help.search command (alternatively ??) allows searching for help in various ways. For example,

??solve

Try ?help.search for details and more examples.

The examples on a help topic can normally be run by

example(topic)