[r] R: Comment out block of code

Possible Duplicate:
R: Multiline Comment Workarounds?

I want to comment out several lines of code in R. Is there any way of doing it without having to put a # before each line - sort of like /* blocked out code */ in SAS?

This question is related to r comments

The answer is


A sort of block comment uses an if statement:

if(FALSE) {
  all your code
}

It works, but I almost always use the block comment options of my editors (RStudio, Kate, Kwrite).


I use RStudio or Emacs and always use the editor shortcuts available to comment regions. If this is not a possibility then you could use Paul's answer but this only works if your code is syntactically correct.

Here is another dirty way I came up with, wrap it in scan() and remove the result. It does store the comment in memory for a short while so it will probably not work with very large comments. Best still is to just put # signs in front of every line (possibly with editor shortcuts).

foo <- scan(what="character")
These are comments
These are still comments
Can also be code:
x <- 1:10
One line must be blank

rm(foo)

I have dealt with this at talkstats.com in posts 94, 101 & 103 found in the thread: Share Your Code. As others have said Rstudio may be a better way to go. I store these functions in my .Rprofile and actually use them a but to automatically block out lines of code quickly.

Not quite as nice as you were hoping for but may be an approach.


Wrap it in an unused function:

.f = function() {

## unwanted code here:

}