What does The following object is masked from package xxx mean

Question

When I load a package  I get a message stating that    The following object is masked from  package xxx    For example  if I load testthat then assertive  I get the following   library testthat  library assertive       Attaching package     assertive           The following objects are masked from    package testthat                has names  is false  is less than  is null  is true   What does this message mean  and how do I prevent it

User · Answer

I have the same problem  I avoid it with remove packages  quot Package making this confusion quot   and it works  In my case  I don t need the second package  so that is not a very good idea

User · Answer

The message means that both the packages have functions with the same names  In this particular case  the testthat and assertive packages contain five functions with the same name   When two functions have the same name  which one gets called   R will look through the search path to find functions  and will use the first one that it finds   search         1    GlobalEnv          package assertive   package testthat         4   tools rstudio       package stats       package graphics         7   package grDevices   package utils       package datasets        10   package methods     Autoloads           package base    In this case  since assertive was loaded after testthat  it appears earlier in the search path  so the functions in that package will be used     is true    function  x   xname   get name in parent x                x  lt - coerce to x   logical    xname         call and name function x               ok  lt - x  amp   is na x             set cause ok  ifelse is na x    missing    false              x        lt bytecode  0x0000000004fc9f10 gt   lt environment  namespace assertive base gt    The functions in testthat are not accessible in the usual way  that is  they have been masked   What if I want to use one of the masked functions   You can explicitly provide a package name when you call a function  using the double colon operator       For example   testthat  is true    function                 function x  expect true x           lt environment  namespace testthat gt    How do I suppress the message   If you know about the function name clash  and don t want to see it again  you can suppress the message by passing warn conflicts   FALSE to library   library testthat  library assertive  warn conflicts   FALSE    No output this time   Alternatively  suppress the message with suppressPackageStartupMessages   library testthat  suppressPackageStartupMessages library assertive     Also no output   Impact of R s Startup Procedures on Function Masking  If you have altered some of R s startup configuration options  see  Startup  you may experience different function masking behavior than you might expect  The precise order that things happen as laid out in  Startup should solve most mysteries   For example  the documentation there says      Note that when the site and user profile files are sourced only the   base package is loaded  so objects in other packages need to be   referred to by e g  utils  dump frames or after explicitly loading the   package concerned    Which implies that when 3rd party packages are loaded via files like  Rprofile you may see functions from those packages masked by those in default packages like stats  rather than the reverse  if you loaded the 3rd party package after R s startup procedure is complete   How do I list all the masked functions   First  get a character vector of all the environments on the search path  For convenience  we ll name each element of this vector with its own value   library dplyr  envs  lt - search     gt   setNames         For each environment  get the exported functions  and other variables    fns  lt - lapply envs  ls    Turn this into a data frame  for easy use with dplyr   fns by env  lt - data frame    env   rep int names fns   lengths fns      fn    unlist fns      Find cases where the object appears more than once   fns by env   gt      group by fn    gt      tally     gt      filter n  gt  1    gt      inner join fns by env    To test this  try loading some packages with known conflicts  e g   Hmisc  AnnotationDbi    How do I prevent name conflict bugs   The conflicted package throws an error with a helpful error message  whenever you try to use a variable with an ambiguous name   library conflicted  library Hmisc  units    Error  units found in 2 packages  You must indicate which one you want with          Hmisc  units       base  units

[r] What does "The following object is masked from 'package:xxx'" mean?

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