What is the word for “log” in R?

| Gabriel |

Like most native speakers of Stata, the most natural thing in the world is to start every script or session with a log file. Typing “log using” is like brushing your teeth, it’s the first thing you do and you just feel gross if you haven’t done it. Judging by what you get if you Google “logging in R” this seems to be something of a cultural eccentricity peculiar to Stata users as R users seems not to understand the question. In particular most responses to the question say something like “use sink(),” which ignores that to a Stata user a log file is neither the command history nor the output, but the two interpolated together so that you can see what command elicited what output.

However, much as the frustrated tourist abroad will occasionally find someone who understands what they mean in asking for a Western toilet, one great StackOverflow user speaks sufficient Stata to direct us to what we were hoping to find. Specifically, the library “TeachingDemos” includes a “txtStart()” function that behaves almost exactly like a Stata log file by default, but where you also have various options such as to suppress commands/output or to use Markdown format.

To install TeachingDemos:

install.packages('TeachingDemos')

Thereafter invoke it start a log file, do your work, and close it:

library(TeachingDemos)
txtStart('mylogfile.txt') # this is similar to "log using mylogfile.txt" in Stata
#insert code here to load your data, analyze it, etc
txtStop() # this is similar to "log close" in Stata