Package 'fortunes'

Title: R Fortunes
Description: A collection of fortunes from the R community.
Authors: Achim Zeileis [aut, cre] (ORCID: <https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0918-3766>, R code), R Community [aut] (fortunes), Peter Dalgaard [ctb], Uwe Ligges [ctb], Kevin Wright [ctb], Martin Maechler [ctb], Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen [ctb], Kurt Hornik [ctb], Duncan Murdoch [ctb], Andy Bunn [ctb], Ray Brownrigg [ctb], Roger Bivand [ctb], Spencer Graves [ctb], Jim Lemon [ctb], Christian Kleiber [ctb], David L. Reiner [ctb], Berton Gunter [ctb], Roger Koenker [ctb], Charles Berry [ctb], Marc Schwartz [ctb], Michael Dewey [ctb], Ben Bolker [ctb], Peter Dunn [ctb], Sarah Goslee [ctb], Simon Blomberg [ctb], Bill Venables [ctb], Roland Rau [ctb], Thomas Petzoldt [ctb], Rolf Turner [ctb], Mark Leeds [ctb], Emmanuel Charpentier [ctb], Chris Evans [ctb], Paolo Sonego [ctb], Peter Ehlers [ctb], Detlef Steuer [ctb], Tal Galili [ctb], Greg Snow [ctb], Brian D. Ripley [ctb], Michael Sumner [ctb], David Winsemius [ctb], Liviu Andronic [ctb], Brian Diggs [ctb], Matthieu Stigler [ctb], Michael Friendly [ctb], Dirk Eddelbuettel [ctb], Richard M. Heiberger [ctb], Patrick Burns [ctb], Dieter Menne [ctb], Andrie de Vries [ctb], Barry Rowlingson [ctb], Renaud Lancelot [ctb], R. Michael Weylandt [ctb], Jon Olav Skoien [ctb], Francois Morneau [ctb], Antony Unwin [ctb], Joshua Wiley [ctb], Terry Therneau [ctb], Bryan Hanson [ctb], Henrik Singmann [ctb], Eduard Szoecs [ctb], Gregor Passolt [ctb], John C. Nash [ctb], Thierry Onkelinx [ctb], Ron Ammar [ctb], Joshua Ulrich [ctb], Michael Meyners [ctb], John Sorkin [ctb]
Maintainer: Achim Zeileis <[email protected]>
License: GPL-2 | GPL-3
Version: 1.5-5
Built: 2026-06-25 17:14:24 UTC
Source: https://codeberg.org/zeileis/fortunes

Help Index

R Fortunes

Description

Read and print R fortunes.

Usage

fortune(which = NULL, fortunes.data = NULL, fixed = TRUE,
        showMatches = FALSE, author = character(), ...)
## S3 method for class 'fortune'
print(x, width = NULL, ...)
read.fortunes(file = NULL)

Arguments

which

an integer specifying the row number of fortunes.data. Alternatively which can be a character and grep is used to try to find a suitable row.
fortunes.data

data frame containing a fortune in each row. By default the fortune data from the fortunes package are used.
fixed

logical passed to grep if which is a character, indicating if it should work (if TRUE, as by default) with a simple character string or (if FALSE) with regular expressions.
showMatches

if which is character, a logical indicating if fortune() should print all the row numbers of fortunes.data which match the grep search.
author

a character string to match (via grep) to the "authors" column of fortunes.data.
...

potential further arguments passed to grep.
x

an object of class "fortune", usually a single row from fortunes.data.
width

integer specifying the character width. By default getOption("width") is used.
file

a character string giving a fortune database in csv format (in UTF-8 encoding). By default all csv files in the data directory of the fortune package are used.

Value

fortune() returns an object of class "fortune" which is a row from a data frame of fortunes (like those read in from read.fortunes).

read.fortunes() returns a data frame of fortunes, each row contains:

quote

the quote, main part of the fortune,
author

the author of the quote,
context

the context in which it was quoted (if available, otherwise NA),
source

where it was quoted (if available, otherwise NA),
date

when it was quoted (if available, otherwise NA).

Examples

fortune() # a random one
fortune("Ripley") # a random one from those with 'Ripley'
fortune(author = "Ripley") # a random one from those by 'Ripley'
fortune(17)

fortune("parse", showMatches = TRUE) # -> shows at least 5 matches
fortune("parse.*answer") # nothing found but...
fortune("parse.*answer", fixed = FALSE) # ...this works


## The first three "all together"   ('setNames()' requires at least R 3.0.0):
lapply(setNames(, c(38, 106, 129)), fortune)