as.cat makes a character vector print as if it was catted rather than printed (one element per line, no extra quotes or backslashes, no [1] etc prefixes).
clip removes the last n elements of x.
cq is handy for typing cq( alpha, beta, gamma) instead of cq( "alpha", "beta", "gamma"). Certain strings DO still require quotes around them, e.g. cq( "NULL", "1-2")).
deparse.names.parsably is like deparse except that name objects get wrapped in a call to as.name, so that they won't be evaluated accidentally.
empty.data.frame creates a template data frame with 0 rows but with all columns of the appropriate type. Useful for rbinding to later.
env.name.string returns a string naming an environment; its name attribute if there is one, or the name of its path attribute if applicable, concatenated with the first line of what would be shown if you printed the argument. Unlike environmentName, this will always return a non-empty string.
expanded.call returns the full argument list available to its caller, including defaults where arguments were not set explicitly. The arguments may not be those originally passed, if they were modified before the invocation of expanded.call. Default arguments which depend on calculations after the invocation of expanded.call will lead to an error.
everyth extracts every by-th element of x, starting at position from.
find.funs finds "function" objects (or objects of other modes, via the "mode" arg) in one or more environments, optionally matching a pattern.
find.lurking.envs( myobj) will search through myobj and all its attributes, returning the size of each sub-object. The size of environments is returned as Inf. The search is completely recursive, except for environments and by default the inner workings of functions; attributes of the entire function are always recursed. Changing the delve parameter to TRUE ensures full recursion of function arguments and function bodies, which will show e.g. the srcref structure; try it to see why the default is FALSE. find.lurking.envs can be very useful for working out e.g. why the result of a model-fitting function is taking up 1000000MB of disk space; sometimes this is due to unnecessary environments in well-concealed places.
index returns the position(s) of TRUE elements. Unlike which: attributes are lost; NA elements map to NAs; index(<<length 0 object>>) is numeric(0); index( <<non-logical>>) is NA.
integ is a handy wrapper for integrate, that takes an expression rather than a function--- so integ( sin(x), 0, 1) "just works".
is.dir tests for directoriness.
isF and isT test a logical scalar in the obvious way, with NA (and non-logicals) failing the test, to avoid teeeedious repetition of is( !is.na( my.complicated.expression) & my.complicated.expression) .... They are deliberately not vectorized (contrary to some versions of mvbutils documentation); arguments with non-1 length trigger a warning.
legal.filename coerces its character argument into a similar-looking string that is a legal filename on any (?) system.
lsall is like ls but coerces all.names=TRUE.
masked checks which objects in search()[pos] are masked by identically-named objects higher in the search path. masking checks for objects mask identically-named objects lower in the search path. Namespaces may make the results irrelevant.
mkdir makes directories; unlike dir.create, it can do several levels at once.
most.recent returns the highest-so-far position of TRUE within a logical vector, or 0 if TRUE has not occurred yet; most.recent( c(F,T,F,T)) returns c(0,2,2,4).
my.all.equal is like all.equal, except that it returns FALSE in cases where all.equal returns a non-logical-mode result.
named(x) is just names(x) <- as.character( x); x; useful for lapply etc.
nscat, nscatn: see scatn
option.or.default obsolete--- use equivalent getOption() instead.
pos is probably to be eschewed in new code, in favour of gregexpr with fixed=TRUE, which is likely faster. (And I should rewrite it to use gregexpr.) It's one of a few legacy functions in mvbutils that pre-date improvements in base R. pos will either search for several literal patterns in a single target, or vice versa-- but not both. It returns a matrix showing the positions of the matching substrings, with as many columns as the maximum number of matches. 0 signifies "no match"; there is always at least one column even if there are no matches at all.
returnList returns a list corresponding to old-style (pre-R 1.8) return syntax. Briefly: a single argument is returned as itself. Multiple arguments are returned in a list. The names of that list are the argument names if provided; or, for any unnamed argument that is just a symbolic name, that symbolic name; or no name at all, for other unnamed arguments. You can duplicate pre-1.8 behaviour of return(...) via return(returnList(...)).
safe.rbind ( Deprecated in 2013 ) mimics rbind, but works round an R bug (I reckon) where a column appears to be a numeric in one data.frame but a factor in the other. But I now think you should just sort your column classes/types properly in advance, rather than mixing types and relying on somewhat arbitrary conversion rules.
scatn is just cat( sprintf( fmt, ...), "", file=file, sep=sep). scatn prints a newline afterwards, but not before; nscat does the opposite; nscatn does both. If you're just displaying a "title" before calling print, use nscat.
to.regexpr converts literal strings to their equivalent regexps, e.g. by doubling backslashes. Useful if you want "fixed=TRUE" to apply only to a portion of your regexp.
yes.no cats its "prompt" argument and waits for user input. if the user input pmatches "yes" or "YES", then yes.no returns TRUE; if the input pmatches no or NO then yes.no returns FALSE; if the input is '' and default is set, then yes.no returns default; otherwise it repeats the question. You probably want to put a space at the end of prompt.