Functions with the same (identical) names in R packages

[Andrzej]

Hi,
I have such a question as how to check in R, which packages in my current R session that are listed in
sessionInfo() contain functions with exactly the same names, e.g:

1. flextable::border() and ggpubr::border()
2. dplyr::intersect() and base::intersect()
3. Hmisc::is.discrete() and plyr::is.discrete()

How to check it out in order to know in advance, that RStudio at startup loaded packages with the same functions' names and it could cause conflicts/errors?

So eg. I want to use a function count() and in what currently loaded package is it in ?

best regards,

Andrzej

[mishabalyasin]

When you load packages with conflicting names, you are getting the version of last loaded package. To avoid confusion, I would suggest to always use qualified imports, e.g., dplyr::select. This way you don't need to care/remember which package is loaded when.

Another way is to use conflicted package (https://github.com/r-lib/conflicted#conflicted). There, you either explicitly say which functions should be used when or you get an error when you encounter an ambiguous function.

[grosscol]

The base function conflicts() will list duplicates in the search path. Combine that result with find() (documented in utils::apropos) and I think it answers your question.

sapply(conflicts(), find)

[Andrzej]

Thank you very much indeed Mishabalyasin and Grosscol. Misha's solution is very clear as it gives explicit output:

Grosscol's solution - I wish it worked in a simpler way but it gives a little bit vague output:
List of 2
axis.line : list() ..- attr(*, "class")= chr [1:2] "element_blank" "element" panel.background:List of 5
.. fill : NULL .. colour : chr [1:356]
..$ size :function (what, mode = "any", numeric = FALSE, simple.words = TRUE)

and more text like this one above, etc.

Anyway thank you both for fast response and help.

kind regards,
Andrzej

[grosscol]

Huh. That's peculiar. I wonder if some package conflicts changed which find or conflicts were being called. I get a pretty neat matrix back:

     filter          lag             body<-            intersect       kronecker         setdiff         setequal        union          
[1,] "package:dplyr" "package:dplyr" "package:methods" "package:dplyr" "package:methods" "package:dplyr" "package:dplyr" "package:dplyr"
[2,] "package:stats" "package:stats" "package:base"    "package:base"  "package:base"    "package:base"  "package:base"  "package:base" 

What does the list applied version give you?

conflicted <- base::conflicts()
which_packages_by_function <- lapply(conflicted, utils::find)
names(which_packages_by_function) <- conflicted
which_packages_by_function
#$filter
#[1] "package:dplyr" "package:stats"
#
#$lag
#[1] "package:dplyr" "package:stats"
#
#$`body<-`
#[1] "package:methods" "package:base"   
#
# ...

[Andrzej]

Now with your code this looks much better and it shows all conflicts as a list. The list is big as I have many packages installed.

my_conflicts <- which_packages_by_function

and:

But I would like to get such a matrix as you have got, with all packages divided by:
filter lag body<- intersect kronecker setdiff setequal union.

How can I do that ?

[grosscol]

That's odd that our results are so different. I don't know what is going on in the environment. You might try clearing your environment, only loading a couple of packages like dplyr and tidyr, then re-running the conflict listing code. See if that gets your results closer to what I'm seeing.

To get a matrix output, you might try running the sapply approach and namespace the references to the functions base::conflicts() and utils::find.

Also, please copy and paste your output using this forum's formatting blocks. Posting images of text is difficult for me to read.