The premise of roxygen2 is simple: describe your functions in comments next to their definitions and roxygen2 will process your source code and comments to automatically generate .Rd files in man/, NAMESPACE, and, if needed, the Collate field in DESCRIPTION.

# Install roxygen2 from CRAN install.packages("roxygen2") # Or the development version from GitHub: # install.packages("pak") pak::pak("r-lib/roxygen2")

The premise of roxygen2 is simple: describe your functions in comments next to their definitions and roxygen2 will process your source code and comments to produce Rd files in the man/ directory. Here's a simple example from the stringr package:

#' The length of a string #' #' Technically this returns the number of "code points", in a string. One #' code point usually corresponds to one character, but not always. For example, #' an u with a umlaut might be represented as a single character or as the #' combination a u and an umlaut. #' #' @inheritParams str_detect #' @return A numeric vector giving number of characters (code points) in each #' element of the character vector. Missing string have missing length. #' @seealso [stringi::stri_length()] which this function wraps. #' @export #' @examples #' str_length(letters) #' str_length(NA) #' str_length(factor("abc")) #' str_length(c("i", "like", "programming", NA)) str_length <- function(string) { }

When you roxygenise() (or devtools::document()) your package these comments will be automatically transformed to the .Rd that R uses to generate the documentation you see when you type ?str_length.

To get started, first read vignette("roxygen2"). Then read more about the specific package component that you want to generate:

• Start with vignette("rd") to learn how document your functions with roxygen2.

• vignette("rd-other") discusses how to document other things like datasets, the package itself, and the various pieces used by R's OOP systems.

• vignette("rd-formatting") gives the details of roxygen2's rmarkdown support.

• vignette("reuse") demonstrates the tools available to reuse documentation in multiple places.

• vignette("namespace") describes how to generate a NAMESPACE file, how namespacing works in R, and how you can use roxygen2 to be specific about what your package needs and supplies.

• For the Collate field in the DESCRIPTION, see ?update_collate().