README.md

In gastonstat/cranium: Craniography Tools for Exploring R packages in CRAN

CRANIUM

The R package "cranium" is part of the Craniography project for exploring R packages in CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network).

It is developed and maintained by Gaston Sanchez, and kindly shared to the R community.

Installation

An integral part of the craniography project is the R package "cranium" freely available on github. To install the package, open your R console and run the following commands:

# install "devtools" (if you don't have it yet)
install.packages("devtools") 

# load devtools
library(devtools)

# install "cranium"
install_github('cranium', username = 'gastonstat')

# load cranium
librayr(cranium)

Description

"cranium" allows you to do three major tasks:

• Parse a given package in CRAN available (current versions)
• Parse a given package in CRAN Archive (previous versions)
• Build JSON structure of a package dependencies to plot with D3.js

Scraping the attributes of a package current version description

To parse the description of an R package's current version, pass the name of the package you are interested in to the scrape_current_pkg() function. The output is a list with all the attributes of the package's description:

# R package 'plspm'
package_name = "plspm"

# List of attributes from the current description of 'plspm'
current_plspm = scrape_current_pkg(package_name)

Scraping previous versions of a given package

To parse previous versions (i.e. archived versions) of an R package, pass the name of the package you are interested in to the scrape_previous_pkg() function. The output is a data frame with the information of previous versions:

# R package 'plspm'
package_name = "plspm"

# Data Frame with the previous versions of 'plspm'
prev_table = scrape_previous_pkg(package_name)

Download a local HTML copy of a package description

Most of the times it's a good idea to save a local copy of the HTML CRAN descriptions of the explored package. You can download the HTML file with the current description of an R package like this:

# R package 'plspm'
package_name = "plspm"

# destiny file
html_current = "plspm_current.html"

# download local html copy (in your working directory)
download_current_pkg(package_name, html_current)

Download a local HTML copy of a package previous version

Most of the times it's a good idea to save a local copy of the HTML CRAN descriptions of the explored package. You can download the HTML file with the archived (previous) versions of an R package like this:

# R package 'plspm'
package_name = "plspm"

# destiny file
html_previous = "plspm_previous.html"

# download local html copy (in your working directory)
download_previous_pkg(package_name, html_previous)

Build JSON Tree

To help you visualize the dependencies of an R package using the D3.js JavaScript library, "cranium" prodives the function build_json_tree() to get a json file with the right data structure required by tree layouts (eg Radial Reingold–Tilford Tree, Dendrogram)

# List of attributes from the current description of 'plspm'
current_plspm = scrape_current_pkg(package_name)

# select dependencies of 'plspm'
plspm_deps = current_plspm[c("depends", "imports", "suggests", 
  "revdepends", "revimports", "revsuggests")]

build_json_tree(plspm_deps, file = "toy_json_tree.json")

Author Contact

Gaston Sanchez (gaston.stat at gmail.com)

gastonstat/cranium documentation built on May 16, 2019, 5:45 p.m.