Topics in R

Introduction In contrast to many other programming languages, R has no real native switch-case statement. It does provide the primitive switch() function; but switch()  is actually made to select elements from a list based on their name or index position. It cannot (at least not without awkward workarounds) be used to build conditions with more complex comparison values. Also, when fed with a numeric expression, it interprets the expression as an index and selects the element from the list at this index position. This is not useful when you want to test an expression against another numeric expression/value. It would be good to have an efficient way of testing multiple, similar conditions, including conditions that are more complex in their comparison values or result in numeric values. At the same time nested if-else constructs should be avoided because they make the code less clear and readable. The switchcase package provides a solution by offering a true switch-case co...

Recently, I published an article in the German online magazine ' Informatik Aktuell ' about R package development. It is a pragmatic introduction to contributing your own packages to R and works with a simple example package that is developed from A to Z in the article. The code of this example package ( tempconvertr ) can also be found in a GitHub repo at  https://github.com/jsugarelli/tempconvertr . Read the full article here (in German):  https://www.informatik-aktuell.de/entwicklung/programmiersprachen/r-packages-entwickeln.html .

A new version (0.1.5) of my 'packagefinder' package is now available on CRAN. The main change is an imroved ranking mechanism for search results that delivers more relevant results. Apart from that, a new shortcut function fp() is available that saves typing work when calling findPackage(). The 'packagefinder' package is designed to search for packages on CRAN directly from the R console with ease and comfort. Learn more about the 'packagefinder' package... on CRAN: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/packagefinder/index.html on GitHub: https://github.com/jsugarelli/packagefinder on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66Mes6_hYno on the web (tutorial): http://www.zuckarelli.de/packagefinder/tutorial.html Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jsugarelli

A new version of my package packagefinder is available on CRAN. It has a lot of new features and comes with a YouTube tutorial . What is packagefinder? How does it benefit me? Currently, there are more than 14,000 R package contributions on CRAN providing R with an unparalleled wealth of features. The downside of the large and increasing amount of packages is that it becomes increasingly difficult to find the right tools to tackle a specific problem. Unfortunately, CRAN does not provide any good search functionality. packagefinder is designed to search for CRAN packages right from the R console. The philosophy behind this package is that R users like using the R console and need a tool to do their day-to-day-work on CRAN without leaving their normal workspace, the console. In fact, the idea is that with packagefinder you do not need to leave the R console to work with CRAN effectively. packagefinder is developed to save you time and energy finding the right packages to wor...

debugr is a new package designed to support debugging in R. It mainly provides the dwatch() function which prints a debug output to the console or to a file. A debug output can consist of a static text message, the values of one or more objects (potentially transformed by applying some functions) or the value of one or multiple (more complex) R expressions. Whether or not a debug message is displayed can be made dependent on the evaluation of a criterion phrased as an R expression. Generally, debug messages are only shown if the debug mode is activated. The debug mode is activated and deactivated with debugr_switchOn() and  debugr_switchOff() , respectively, which change the logical debugr.active  value in the global options. Since debug messages are only displayed in debug mode, the dwatch()  function calls can even remain in the original code as they remain silent and won't have any effect until the debug mode is switched on again. Read more : The package's vign...

Given the vast amount of R packages available today, it makes sense (at least to me, as a trained economist) to ask a simple yet difficult question: How much value has been created by all those packages? As all R stuff on CRAN is open-source (which is a blessing), there is no measureable GDP contribution in terms of market value that we can use to provide a quick answer. But all of us R users know the pleasant feeling, if not to say the excitement, of finding a package that provides exactly the functionality we have been looking for so long. This saves us the time of developing the functionality ourselves. So, apparantly, the time saving is one way to estimate the beneficial effect of the package sharing on CRAN. Here comes a simple (and not too serious) approach to estimating this effect.  (Side note: I am well aware of the extremely high concentration of capable statisticians and data scientists in the R community, so be clement with my approach, I am, as you will see shortly...

There are over 12,700 R packages on CRAN . How to find the right one for you? The new package ' packagefinder ' helps you search for packages on CRAN right from the R console. With 'packagefinder' you can search for multiple keywords in the name, title and description of the CRAN package, either case-sensitive or insensitive and define your own weighting scheme for the search results, if you like. Once you have found a promising package, you can use the simple function go() to go to the package's CRAN webpage or view its PDF manual, directly from the R console without having to installing the package first. Of course, you can also install the package easily, if you want to try it out. Check our 'packagefinder' on CRAN:  https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/packagefinder/index.html And leave your comments on GitHub ( https://github.com/jsugarelli/packagefinder ) or contact me via  Twitter  or  e-mail . Your ideas are highly appreciated!