Question

It’s getting to the point where I have about 100 or so personal functions that I use for line by line data analysis. I generally use f.<mnemonic> nomenclature for my functions, but I’m finding that they’re starting to get in the way of my work. Is there any way to hide them from the workspace? Such that ls() doesn’t show them, but I can still use them?

Answer 1

Try this to leave out the “f-dots”:

fless <- function() { ls(env=.GlobalEnv)[!grepl("^f\\.", ls(env=.GlobalEnv) )]}

The ls() function looks at objects in an environment. If you only used (as I initially did) :

fless <- function() ls()[!grepl("^f\\.", ls())]

You get … nothing. Adding .GlobalEnv moves the focus for ls() out to the usual workspace. The indexing is pretty straightforward. You are just removing (with the ! operator) anything that starts with “f.” and since the “.” is a special character in regex expressions, you need to escape it, … and since the “\” is also a special character, the escape needs to be doubled.