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forgot

The goal of forgot is to help you search for that one function you need in that one package. This package is based on functions from Rd2roxygen. The forgot() function returns a tibble of section content in R documentation files from a specified package (that’s already installed). You can search on this tibble and return an interactive HTML table if needed. There’s also a RStudio Addin included that you can use to search package documentation in a small Shiny app. forgot2() is for more casual use and will return a simple version of the forgot tibble with just the first two columns by default.

This package provides an alternative to function search without using the help system (?help()) in the RStudio IDE. You should still use that though for learning purposes.

Installation

You can install the development version of forgot like so:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("parmsam/forgot")

Examples

This are examples which show you how to solve common problems:

Create a forgot tibble that has columns for doc sections in package functions

library(forgot)
library(dplyr)
## basic example code
functions_in_pkg <- forgot("stringr")
functions_in_pkg %>% 
  select(function_name, title, desc) %>%
  head()
#> # A tibble: 6 × 3
#>   function_name title                                                      desc 
#>   <chr>         <chr>                                                      <chr>
#> 1 case          Convert string to upper case, lower case, title case, or … "\n\…
#> 2 invert_match  Switch location of matches to location of non-matches      "\nI…
#> 3 modifiers     Control matching behaviour with modifier functions         "\nM…
#> 4 %>%           Pipe operator                                              "\nP…
#> 5 str_c         Join multiple strings into one string                      "\n\…
#> 6 str_conv      Specify the encoding of a string                           "\nT…

Search for a keyword of interest in the forgot tibble

forgot("stringr", keyword = "count")
#> # A tibble: 5 × 13
#>   function_name title     usage desc  value author examples name  aliases params
#>   <chr>         <chr>     <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>  <chr>    <chr> <chr>   <chr> 
#> 1 modifiers     Control … "\nf… "\nM… "\nA… "char… "\npatt… modi… "c(\"m… "c(\"…
#> 2 str_count     Count nu… "\ns… "\nC… "\nA… "char… "\nfrui… str_… "NULL"  "c(\"…
#> 3 str_interp    String i… "\ns… "\n\… "\nA… "\nSt… "\n\n# … str_… "NULL"  "c(\"…
#> 4 str_split     Split up… "\ns… "\nT… "\n\… "char… "\nfrui… str_… "c(\"s… "c(\"…
#> 5 word          Extract … "\nw… "\nE… "\nA… "char… "\nsent… word  "NULL"  "c(\"…
#> # ℹ 3 more variables: keywords <chr>, seealso <chr>, format <chr>

Or search for a keyword of interest only on specific fields

forgot("stringr", keyword = "count", selected = c("title", "desc"))
#> # A tibble: 1 × 3
#>   function_name title                   desc                                    
#>   <chr>         <chr>                   <chr>                                   
#> 1 str_count     Count number of matches "\nCounts the number of times \\code{pa…

If you want to search across multiple packages, here’s an example of how you can use purrr to help with that

library(purrr)
c("stringr", "dplyr") %>%
  purrr::set_names() %>%
  map(forgot, keyword = "count") %>%
  list_rbind(names_to = "Package")

Lastly, here’s how you can get a reactable HTML table that you can search on

forgot("stringr", keyword = "count", selected = c("title", "desc"),
               interactive = T)

Cat a roxygen2 field of interest into your R console

Here’s how you can cat (?cat() for more info) the parameter field, usage field, or example field. Try it out to see how it looks.

forgot_params("dplyr", "count")
forgot_usg("dplyr", "count")
forgot_exmpls("dplyr", "count")

The write logical (see forgot_exmpls() documentation for example) argument will create a new RStudio document with the roxygen2 field content of interest that was cat.

Shortcuts

You can also use some shortcut operators to get the same results as above.

# shortcut for forgot2
"dplyr" %f2% "count"
## OR
dplyr %f2% "count"
# shortcut for forgot_usg
"dplyr" %fu% "count"
## OR
dplyr %fu% count
# shortcut for forgot_exmpls
"dplyr" %fe% "count"
## OR
dplyr %fe% count

# shortcut for forgot_params
"dplyr" %fp% "count"
## OR
dplyr %fp% count

Credits