Which function should be used to load a package in R, require or library?

The main difference between require and library is that require was designed to use inside functions and library is used to load packages. If a package is not available then library throws an error on the other hand require gives a warning message.

Using library

> library(xyz)
Error in library(xyz) : there is no package called ‘xyz’

Using require

require(xyz)
Loading required package: xyz
Warning message:
In library(package, lib.loc = lib.loc, character.only = TRUE, logical.return = TRUE, :
there is no package called ‘xyz’

Here we can see that the library shows an error and require gives a warning message, since warnings are mostly avoided and we tend to move further hence require is not recommended because further steps will throw an error or warning again.

Nizamuddin Siddiqui

Published on 06-Jul-2020 15:01:37

• Related Questions & Answers
• How can scikit-learn library be used to load data in Python?
• Which equals operator (== vs ===) should be used in JavaScript?
• Which MySQL Datatype should be used for storing BloodType?
• Which library can be used to interact with database in JSP?
• Which equals operator (== vs ===) should be used in JavaScript comparisons
• Which Measurement Unit should be used in CSS to set letter spacing
• Which SciPy package is used to implement Clustering?
• Among id, name, xpath and css, which locator should be used?
• Explain the scenario in which CURSOR should be used over a standalone SELECT statement?
• How to load classes at runtime from a folder or Java package
• How can Tensorflow be used to load the dataset which contains stackoverflow questions using Python?
• MySQL isn’t inserting binary data properly? Which datatype should be used?
• How should strace be used on Linux?
• Which MySQL function can be used to append values of a column with single quotes?
• How can BeautifulSoup package be used to parse data from a webpage in Python?