CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
Heather Stark
Heather Stark

Reputation: 607

Tidying up history in RStudio to document an analysis

I am doing some analysis in Rstudio and at the moment - as I am refreshing my knowledge of R after a few decades away from S - this involves writing lots of one-liner statements which operate on test datasets, and then inspecting/testing the output, then finally scaling it up when I've checked all the little bits work.

So my history is full of syntax errors and similar. But I am making progress every time I work, and each time I work there are statements that worked, that I want to save, in order to document the bits of the session that are worth saving. Is there any established way of extracting these from my history for re-use, in RStudio? Should I just scroll through after each session and copy and paste them into a textfile with a word processor? Or is there something more clever than that that I can do, staying within RStudio?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 732

Answers (2)

Corvus
Corvus

Reputation: 8049

The easiest way to see your history, is to hit Ctrl-4 and that will bring up the history window. You can copy this to source and then edit it, or where ever. However, for what you are doing it is probably better to edit directly into a source window.

The setup I use is to have a script window open, and use ctrl-enter to run the current line.

To make this easier go into Tools>Options>Code Editing and ensure that "focus console after executing from source" is unchecked and your cursor will stay in the script after the line is executed.

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You can now type your lines and edit them until they do what you want, then move on to the next when it works. Once you get to the end you have built up your script already. Also since your "history" is just their in front of you, it is much easier to skip back to older lines and rerun or modify them. If you want to run a block of code, simply highlight the block and hit ctrl-enter.

Upvotes: 3

Ari B. Friedman
Ari B. Friedman

Reputation: 72741

In the history panel in RStudio (top right panel), you can click "send to source" and it will copy the line you have selected over to whatever .R file you have open in the top left panel.

Upvotes: 2

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