Suppress Warnings Globally in R (Example)

In this R tutorial you’ll learn how to disable warning messages in the global options.

Table of contents:

• Example: Disable Warning Messages in R
• Set Global Options to Default
• Video & Further Resources

Let’s dive right into the examples…

Example: Disable Warning Messages in R

I’ll illustrate the suppression of warning messages in R based on the pmax function. Consider the following R code:

pmax(1:3, 1:5)                     # pmax function returns warning
# [1] 1 2 3 4 5
# Warning message:
# In pmax(1:3, 1:5) : an argument will be fractionally recycled

As you can see, the pmax function returns a warning message to the RStudio console.

We can suppress this warning message by running the following R syntax:

options(warn = - 1)                # Disable warning messages globally

The previous R code specifies globally that warnings are never returned to the RStudio console.

Let’s illustrate that based on the pmax function. If we run exactly the same R code as before, no warnings are returned:

pmax(1:3, 1:5)                     # pmax function without warnings
# [1] 1 2 3 4 5

Set Global Options to Default

In case you want to turn on warning messages again, you can set the global R options for warnings back to default as shown below:

options(warn = 0)                  # Set warning messages to default

Let’s run our exemplifying pmax function once more:

pmax(1:3, 1:5)                     # pmax function returns warning again
# [1] 1 2 3 4 5
# Warning message:
# In pmax(1:3, 1:5) : an argument will be fractionally recycled

The warning message is back!

Video & Further Resources

Do you need further explanations on the R programming syntax of this article? Then you may watch the following video tutorial of my YouTube channel. I’m explaining the examples of this article in the video.

In addition, I can recommend reading some of the related tutorials of my website.

• message, warning & stop Functions in R
• The R Programming Language

Summary: In this article, I showed how to clear and ignore warnings in the R programming language. Please let me know in the comments section, in case you have any additional questions.