Suppress verbose function messages

This function is used to suppress information printed from external functions that make internal use of message and cat, which provide information in interactive R sessions. For simulations, the session is not interactive, and therefore this type of output should be suppressed. For similar behaviour for suppressing warning messages, see manageWarnings.

Usage

quiet(..., cat = TRUE, keep = FALSE, attr.name = "quiet.messages")

Arguments

...

the functional expression to be evaluated

cat

logical; also capture calls from cat? If FALSE only message will be suppressed

keep

logical; return a character vector of the messages/concatenate and print strings as an attribute to the resulting object from expr(...)?

attr.name

attribute name to use when keep = TRUE

References

Chalmers, R. P., & Adkins, M. C. (2020). Writing Effective and Reliable Monte Carlo Simulations with the SimDesign Package. The Quantitative Methods for Psychology, 16(4), 248-280. doi:10.20982/tqmp.16.4.p248

Sigal, M. J., & Chalmers, R. P. (2016). Play it again: Teaching statistics with Monte Carlo simulation. Journal of Statistics Education, 24(3), 136-156. doi:10.1080/10691898.2016.1246953

See also

manageWarnings

Examples

myfun <- function(x, warn=FALSE){
   message('This function is rather chatty')
   cat("It even prints in different output forms!\n")
   message('And even at different....')
   cat("...times!\n")
   if(warn)
     warning('It may even throw warnings!')
   x
}

out <- myfun(1)
#> This function is rather chatty
#> It even prints in different output forms!
#> And even at different....
#> ...times!
out
#> [1] 1

# tell the function to shhhh
out <- quiet(myfun(1))
out
#> [1] 1

# which messages are suppressed? Extract stored attribute
out <- quiet(myfun(1), keep = TRUE)
attr(out, 'quiet.messages')
#>                                   message.1 
#>          "This function is rather chatty\n" 
#>                                   message.2 
#>               "And even at different....\n" 
#>                                       cat.1 
#> "It even prints in different output forms!" 
#>                                       cat.2 
#>                                 "...times!" 

# Warning messages still get through (see manageWarnings(suppress)
#  for better alternative than using suppressWarnings())
out2 <- myfun(2, warn=TRUE) |> quiet() # warning gets through
#> Warning: It may even throw warnings!
out2
#> [1] 2

# suppress warning message explicitly, allowing others to be raised if present
myfun(2, warn=TRUE) |> quiet() |>
   manageWarnings(suppress='It may even throw warnings!')
#> [1] 2