Ways to get all function signatures of a library?

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 9:09 AM, Thorsten Jolitz <tjolitz at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi List,

are there ways to get signatures of all functions of a library in a
format that is easy to process by a programm (list, xml or so)?

The info about function name, return value and arguments (types) is all
there in the docs, but more in a human readable format embedded in much
extra information. How to extract it without writing a documentation
parser or so? I'm pretty sure the functionality exists, but did not find
it.

In general, R functions do not have argument and return types (and
don't even have to have names) but maybe this would do:

library(lattice) # need this for make.groups

# load the package of interest
library(zoo)

DF <- do.call(make.groups, Map(function(x) names(formals(get(x))),
ls("package:zoo")))
rownames(DF) <- NULL

giving:

head(DF)

    data           which
1      x         as.Date
2    ...         as.Date
3      x as.Date.numeric
4 origin as.Date.numeric
5    ... as.Date.numeric
6      x      as.Date.ts