R News file

Returns the contents of the NEWS.html file in the standard browser installed on the operating system.

rnews(pdf = FALSE, dev = FALSE)

Arguments

pdf

If FALSE (default), the NEWS.html file will open in the browser, otherwise NEWS.pdf will be opened.

dev

If FALSE (default), it will not show changes made to the language development version. To see changes in the development version, do dev = TRUE.

Details

The NEWS.html file contains the main changes from the recently released versions of the R language. The goal is to facilitate the query by invoking it directly from the R command prompt. The rnews function is analogous to the news function of the utils package. However, using the news command in a terminal style bash shell is possible to receive a message like:

news()
starting httpd help server ... done
Error in browseURL(url) : 'browser' must be a non-empty character string

This is an error that may occur depending on the installation of R. Always prefer the use of the news function but if you need to, use the rnews function.