Here's a bit of a weird one: I just noticed that my ??<term> search does not work anymore in RStudio (1.2.1335). I only get the "search results" page with "No results found". (For example, ??anova used to yield dozens of results.)
?<function_name> works fine in RStudio. ?? works when running an R session in a terminal.
My session details:
R version 3.6.0 (2019-04-26)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS
Matrix products: default
BLAS: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas/libblas.so.3
LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libopenblasp-r0.2.20.so
locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C LC_TIME=en_AU.UTF-8
[4] LC_COLLATE=en_AU.UTF-8 LC_MONETARY=en_AU.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_AU.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=en_AU.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C LC_ADDRESS=C
[10] LC_TELEPHONE=C LC_MEASUREMENT=en_AU.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_3.6.0 htmltools_0.3.6 tools_3.6.0 yaml_2.2.0 Rcpp_1.0.1 rmarkdown_1.13
[7] knitr_1.23 xfun_0.7 digest_0.6.19 evaluate_0.13
I couldn't find a similar problem online. Any idea what might have gone wrong?
Nothing you did. I can reproduce the problem in Ubuntu and Mojave. I thought it might have been a failure to start the http help server, but the Help tab works and you can even use the search box equivalent to ??. My guess is that ?? isn't passing its argument.
Ah glad I'm not the only one! I can confirm the help.search() (which ?? is a shortcut for) fails to return results, but only from the RStudio console.
I also tested with RKward to compare with another program using the HTML browser to display documentation, and help.search() (or ??) works as expected.