break/exit script

Question

I have a program that does some data analysis and is a few hundred lines long.

Very early on in the program, I want to do some quality control and if there is not enou

Answer 1

This is an old question but there is no a clean solution yet. This probably is not answering this specific question, but those looking for answers on 'how to gracefully exit from an R script' will probably land here. It seems that R developers forgot to implement an exit() function. Anyway, the trick I've found is:

continue <- TRUE

tryCatch({
     # You do something here that needs to exit gracefully without error.
     ...

     # We now say bye-bye         
     stop("exit")

}, error = function(e) {
    if (e$message != "exit") {
        # Your error message goes here. E.g.
        stop(e)
    }

    continue <<-FALSE
})

if (continue) {
     # Your code continues here
     ...
}

cat("done.\n")

Basically, you use a flag to indicate the continuation or not of a specified block of code. Then you use the stop() function to pass a customized message to the error handler of a tryCatch() function. If the error handler receives your message to exit gracefully, then it just ignores the error and set the continuation flag to FALSE.