In brodieG/validate: Trust, but Verify

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "##",
  fig.path = "README-",
  error = TRUE
)
library(vetr)

vetr

Vetting Expressions

`vetr` in Functions

If you are vetting function inputs, you can use the vetr function, which works just like vet except that it is streamlined for use within functions:

fun <- function(x, y) {
  vetr(numeric(1L), logical(1L))
  TRUE   # do work...
}
fun(1:2, "foo")
fun(1, "foo")

vetr automatically matches the vetting expressions to the corresponding arguments and fetches the argument values from the function environment.

See vignette for additional details on how the vetr function works.

Additional Documentation

vetr vignette, ?vet, ?vetr, example(vet), example(vetr).
alike vignette, ?alike, and example(alike) for discussion of templates.
A survey of parameter validation functions.

Development Status

vetr is still in development, although most of the features are considered mature. The most likely area of change is the treatment of function and language templates (e.g. alike(sum, max)), and more flexible treatment of list templates (e.g. in future lists may be allowed to be different lengths so long as every named element in the template exists in the object).

Installation

This package is available on CRAN:

install.packages('vetr')

It has no runtime dependencies.

For the development version use remotes::install_github('brodieg/vetr@development') or:

f.dl <- tempfile()
f.uz <- tempfile()
github.url <- 'https://github.com/brodieG/vetr/archive/development.zip'
download.file(github.url, f.dl)
unzip(f.dl, exdir=f.uz)
install.packages(file.path(f.uz, 'vetr-development'), repos=NULL, type='source')
unlink(c(f.dl, f.uz))

The master branch typically mirrors CRAN and should be stable.

Alternatives

There are many alternatives available to vetr. We do a survey of the following in our parameter validation functions review:

Acknowledgments

Thank you to:

R Core for developing and maintaining such a wonderful language.
CRAN maintainers, for patiently shepherding packages onto CRAN and maintaining the repository, and Uwe Ligges in particular for maintaining Winbuilder.
Users and others who have reported bugs and/or helped contribute fixes (see NEWS.md).
Tomas Kalibera for rchk and rcnst to help detect errors in compiled code, and in particular for his infinite patience in helping me resolve the issues he identified for me.
Jim Hester because covr rocks.
Dirk Eddelbuettel and Carl Boettiger for the rocker project, and Gábor Csárdi and the R-consortium for Rhub, without which testing bugs on R-devel and other platforms would be a nightmare.
Winston Chang for the r-debug docker container, in particular because of the valgrind level 2 instrumented version of R.
Hadley Wickham and Peter Danenberg for roxygen2.
Yihui Xie for knitr and J.J. Allaire etal for rmarkdown, and by extension John MacFarlane for pandoc.
Michel Lang for pushing me to implement all_bw to compete with his own package checkmate.
Eugene Ha for pointing me to several other relevant packages, which in turn led to the survey of related packages.
Stefan M. Bache for the idea of having a function for testing objects directly (originally vetr only worked with function arguments), which I took from ensurer.
Olaf Mersmann for microbenchmark, because microsecond matter, and Joshua Ulrich for making it lightweight.
All open source developers out there that make their work freely available for others to use.
Github, Codecov, Vagrant, Docker, Ubuntu, Brew for providing infrastructure that greatly simplifies open source development.
Free Software Foundation for developing the GPL license and promotion of the free software movement.