How can I get the screen resolution in R

Question

How can I get screen resolution (height, width) in pixels?

Cloaca

The more useful question is why; is stuff like tk or other GUI involved? – Chaunce

@Chaunce gvisMotionChart needs a width and height of the chart that it produces. So I thought i could change those parameters according to the screen resolution of the user. – Cloaca

Answer 1

You could use commad-line interface to WMI

> system("wmic desktopmonitor get screenheight")
ScreenHeight  
900   

You could capture result with system

(scr_width <- system("wmic desktopmonitor get screenwidth", intern=TRUE))
# [1] "ScreenWidth  \r" "1440         \r" "\r"
(scr_height <- system("wmic desktopmonitor get screenheight", intern=TRUE))
# [1] "ScreenHeight  \r" "900           \r" "\r" 

With multiple screens, the output is, e.g.,

[1] "ScreenWidth  \r" "1600         \r" "1600         \r" ""

We want all but the first and last values, converted to numbers

as.numeric(c(
  scr_width[-c(1, length(scr_width))], 
  scr_height[-c(1, length(scr_height))]
))
# [1] 1440  900

Marauding

Error in system("wmic desktopmonitor get screenwidth", intern = TRUE) : 'wmic' not found. Do I have to install something? – Cloaca

@gd047 wmic is available on Windows Professional Edition (XP/7) for sure. I know it's missing on XP Home, but I don't know it could be installed. – Marauding

Answer 2

It's easy with JavaScript: you just do

window.screen.height
window.screen.width

You can call JavaScript from R using the SpiderMonkey package from OmegaHat.

---

You could also solve this with Java, and use the rJava package to access it.

library(rJava)
.jinit()
toolkit <- J("java.awt.Toolkit")
default_toolkit <- .jrcall(toolkit, "getDefaultToolkit")
dim <- .jrcall(default_toolkit, "getScreenSize")
height <- .jcall(dim, "D", "getHeight")
width <- .jcall(dim, "D", "getWidth")

Berlyn

Haven't actually tested this myself as I'm struggling to get the package to build. Will report back once I manage this. – Berlyn

What's with the downvote? I know the ideas are only half complete, but they are valid possibilities nonetheless. – Berlyn

It seems to me that this should be achievable without need for a JVM! Personally I'd just wrap up some Win32 API calls but surely somewhere there is a package that allows you to query hardware information. – Otranto

@David: It depends on the usage. For a Windows only solution, Marek's answer is best. If it needs to be portable, then using Java is preferable. – Berlyn

best would be if a portable solution avoiding the heavy weight JVM. – Otranto

this solution just gives me an error - says it runs out of memory and then terminates R – Bash

Answer 3

Accepted answer does not work on Windows 8 and later.

Use this:

system("wmic path Win32_VideoController get VideoModeDescription,CurrentVerticalResolution,CurrentHorizontalResolution /format:value")

To get you screen resolution in a vector, you can implement it as:

  suppressWarnings(
    current_resolution <- system("wmic path Win32_VideoController get CurrentHorizontalResolution,CurrentVerticalResolution /format:value", intern = TRUE)  %>%
      strsplit("=") %>%
      unlist() %>%
      as.double()
  )
  current_resolution <- current_resolution[!is.na(current_resolution)]

Now you'll have a vector with length 2:

> current_resolution
[1] 1920 1080

Difficulty

Answer 4

On Windows you can call GetSystemMetrics passing SM_CXSCREEN and SM_CYSCREEN. This returns the width/height of the screen of the primary display monitor, in pixels.

DWORD dwWidth = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXSCREEN);
DWORD dwHeight = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CYSCREEN);

Loganloganberry

I believe that the poster is looking to do this from the R language rather than C++. – Otranto

@David Hefferman yes you right, sorry, anyway I found this link maybe help – Loganloganberry

Answer 5

The rpanel package has a function that returns the screen resolution:

rpanel::rp.screenresolution()
$width
[1] 1540

$height
[1] 845

Moslem