Getting the contents of a library interactively in R

help(package = packagename) will list all non-internal functions in a package.

Yes, use ls().

You can use search() to see what's in the search path:

> search() [1] ".GlobalEnv"        "package:stats"     "package:graphics"[4] "package:grDevices" "package:utils"     "package:datasets"[7] "package:methods"   "Autoloads"         "package:base"

You can search a particular package with the full name:

 > ls("package:graphics") [1] "abline"          "arrows"          "assocplot"       "axis" ....

I also suggest that you look at this related question on stackoverflow which includes some more creative approaching to browsing the environment. If you're using ESS, then you can use Ess-rdired.

To get the help pages on a particular topic, you can either use help(function.name) or ?function.name. You will also find the help.search() function useful if you don't know the exact function name or package. And lastly, have a look at the sos package.

help(topic) #for documentation on a topic?topicsummary(mydata) #an overview of data objects tryls() # lists all objects in the local namespacestr(object) # structure of an objectls.str() # structure of each object returned by ls()apropos("mytopic") # string search of the documentation

All from the R reference card