Find positions of elements in an Rd object

Find positions of elements for which a function returns TRUE. Optionally, apply another function to the selected elements and return the results along with the positions.

Usage

Rdo_locate(object, f = function(x) TRUE, pos_only = TRUE,
           lists = FALSE, fpos = NULL, nested = TRUE)

Arguments

object: an Rd object
f: a function returning TRUE if an element is desired and FALSE otherwise.
pos_only: if TRUE, return only the positions; if this argument is a function, return also the result of applying the function to the selected element, see Details.
lists: if FALSE, examine only leaves, if TRUE, examine also lists, see Details.
fpos: a function with two arguments, object and position, it is called and the value is returned along with the position, see Details.
nested: a logical value, it has effect only when lists is TRUE, see `Details'.

Details

With the default setting of lists = FALSE, the function f is applied to each leave (a character string) of the Rd object. If lists = TRUE the function f is applied also to each branch (a list). In this case, argument nested controls what happens when f returns TRUE. If nested is TRUE, each element of the list is also inspected recursively, otherwise this is not done and, effectively, the list is considered a leaf. If f does not return TRUE, the value of nested has no effect and the elements of the list are inspected.

The position of each object for which f returns TRUE is recorded as a numeric vector.

fpos and pos_only provide two ways to do something with the selected elements. Argument fpos is more powerful than pos_only but the latter should be sufficient and simpler to use in most cases.

If fpos is a function, it is applied to each selected element with two arguments, object and the position, and the result returned along with the position. In this case argument pos_only is ignored. If fpos is NULL the action depends on pos_only.

If pos_only = TRUE, Rdo_locate returns a list of such vectors (not a matrix since the positions of the leaves are, in general, at different depths).

If pos_only is a function, it is applied to each selected element and the result returned along with the position.

Value

a list with one entry for each selected element. Each entry is a numeric vector or a list with two elements:

pos: the position, a vector of positive integers,
value: the result of applying the function to the element at pos.

Author

Georgi N. Boshnakov

Note

The following needs additional thought.

In some circumstances an empty list, tagged with Rd_tag may turn up, e.g. list() with Rd_tag="\dots" in an \arguments section.

On the one hand this is a list. On the other hand it may be considered a leaf. It is not clear if any attempt to recurse into such a list should be made at all.

Examples

# todo: put examples here!