rlang (version 0.1)

env_names: Names of symbols bound in an environment

Description

env_names() returns object names from an enviroment env as a character vector. All names are returned, even those starting with a dot.

Usage

env_names(env)

Arguments

env

An environment or an object bundling an environment, e.g. a formula, quosure or closure.

Value

A character vector of object names.

Names of symbols and objects

Technically, objects are bound to symbols rather than strings, since the R interpreter evaluates symbols (see is_expr() for a discussion of symbolic objects versus literal objects). However it is often more convenient to work with strings. In rlang terminology, the string corresponding to a symbol is called the name of the symbol (or by extension the name of an object bound to a symbol).

Encoding

There are deep encoding issues when you convert a string to symbol and vice versa. Symbols are always in the native encoding (see set_chr_encoding()). If that encoding (let's say latin1) cannot support some characters, these characters are serialised to ASCII. That's why you sometimes see strings looking like <U+1234>, especially if you're running Windows (as R doesn't support UTF-8 as native encoding on that platform).

To alleviate some of the encoding pain, env_names() always returns a UTF-8 character vector (which is fine even on Windows) with unicode points unserialised.

Examples

# NOT RUN {
env <- env(a = 1, b = 2)
env_names(env)
# }