Question

I’m using R for genetic programming with the RGP package. The environment creates functions that solve problems. I want to save these functions in their own .R source files. I can’t for the life of me figure out how. One way I’ve tried is this:

bf_str = print(bf)
save(bf_str,file="MyBestFunction.R"))

bf is simply the best fit function. I’ve tried it also like this:

save(bf,file="MyBestFunction.R"))

The outputted file is super weird. Its just a bunch of crazy characters

Answer 1

The way I understand your question, you’d like to get a text representation of the functions and save that to a file. To do that, you can divert the output of the R console using the sink function.

sink(file="MyBestFunction.R")
bf_str
sink()

Then you can source the file or open it using R or another program via your OS.

EDIT:

To append a comment to the end of the file, you could do the following:

theScore <- .876

sink(file = "MyBestFunction.R", append = TRUE)
cat("# This was a great function with a score of", theScore, "\r\n")
sink()

Depending on your setup, you might need to change \r\n to reflect the appropriate end of line characters. This should work on DOS/Windows at least.