How to edit and debug R library sources

Question

I've included a library called blotter in my R script which has a bug in it. Is there an easy way for me to edit the source to try and debug the issue?

Answer 1

Look up the trace and browser functions, they are the basic tools in R for debugging. Say you want to edit the source of function foo, then saying

trace("foo",edit=TRUE)

will open up the source of foo in the editor for you to change. However, this is for interactive debugging; the source files in the packages are not changed. So once you have found the bug, you need to change the package source files for the change to be permanent.