How to avoid printing a package's author message?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Library/package development - message when loading

I want to set up a web interface using Rapache; however, the underlying R code uses packages that display a quick message from the author. E.g., for data.table,

Quick start guide : vignette("datatable-intro") Homepage : http://datatable.r-forge.r-project.org/

Is there a way to avoid this? I tried suppressMessages(), and the quietly option to library(), but to no avail.

Thanks

Exact duplicate of: http://stackoverflow.com/q/2192360/602276 — Andrie, Jun 22 '11 at 11:36
Really? It seems that this person wants to print a message. I want to *avoid* printing it. — crayola, Jun 22 '11 at 11:43
I hadn't, because the help on suppressMessages() suggests that it should also suppress package startup messages; however I now tried it, and it didn't work. However, I am now of the opinion that this problem is specific to `data.table` (and maybe other packages, but not all); presumably the startup message is written using cat() or an equivalent function rather than something that suppressMessages() would be able to suppress. I added a `data.table` tag as a consequence. — crayola, Jun 22 '11 at 11:53
If it's done using `cat`, can you surround it with sink commands to reroute the output to a file (if that works for you)? — Nick Sabbe, Jun 22 '11 at 12:10
Better, contact the author of the package and encourage them to use the `packageStartupMessage()` function to write messages that are printed during load/attach. — Gavin Simpson, Jun 22 '11 at 12:37
Good advice from Gavin. The email address to use is returned by the R command: maintainer("") — Matt Dowle, Jun 22 '11 at 12:46
Yes indeed Matt :) we have been bugging a few packages authors to alter their startup code to make it 'suppressable' which is preferred for scripting etc — Dirk Eddelbuettel, Jun 22 '11 at 12:48
I agree.. The question is asked from a very different angle, meaning that merging the answers would be very misleading. It is true that there is some overlap; the information there is relevant here, and vice versa; but is that a sufficient reason to close a thread? — crayola, Jun 26 '11 at 07:54

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 22 '11 at 13:05

For data.table, this was done in commit 233 (2011.06.11 01:04:27) :

"onAttach now uses packageStartupMessage so the banner can be suppressed by those annoyed by banners, whilst still being helpful to new users"

This is in v1.6.1 available from R-Forge, and may be released to CRAN soon.

I'll add a note to NEWS ...

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 22 '11 at 17:03

The brute force way of suppressing all output and messages for chatty packages is to use sink:

t <- tempfile()
tcon <- file(t,open="w+")
sink(file=tcon,type='output')
sink(file=tcon,type='message')
require(YOURLIBRARY)
sink(NULL,type='output')
sink(NULL,type='message')
unlink(t)

TAKE THAT YOU CHATTY PACKAGE!

How to avoid printing a package's author message?

2 Answers2