helpdesk

Embedded in the DESCRIPTION files of our installed.packages is a world of URLs developers have curated for us to learn from. The problem many times is that getting to the right link quickly is a pain in the REDACTED.

The goal of helpdesk is to create a simple api to query URL links embedded in DESCRPITION files of the installed.packages and return a search enabled datatable with active links of the relevant URLs.

Installation

remotes::install_github("yonicd/helpdesk")

Example

library(helpdesk)

Interactive

In RStudio IDE an interactive datatable will be returned in which search fields at the top of the columns is enabled by default to further query the output.

After locating the relevant link you need, the links are enabled to open directly into a new browser tab.

Here is an example

Running in the console the default call

help.pages()

The resulting datatable is returned

That’s it!

Static

Below shows some additional functionality, where the returned objects are converted to html tables. Like before the links are active so you can test them out from the outputs.

Default

returns a table of all the packages with URLs in the DESCRIPTION file

x <- help.pages()
nrow(x)
#> [1] 237
knitr::kable(head(x))

Package	URL
anytime	http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/anytime.html
argparser	https://bitbucket.org/djhshih/argparser
askpass	https://github.com/jeroen/askpass#readme
backports	https://github.com/r-lib/backports
base64enc	http://www.rforge.net/base64enc
BayesFactor	https://richarddmorey.github.io/BayesFactor/

Subset of packages

knitr::kable(help.pages(c('dplyr','ggplot2')))

Package	URL
dplyr	http://dplyr.tidyverse.org https://github.com/tidyverse/dplyr
ggplot2	http://ggplot2.tidyverse.org https://github.com/tidyverse/ggplot2

Using partial matches of package names

knitr::kable(help.pages('tidy',regex = TRUE))

Package	URL
tidyr	http://tidyr.tidyverse.org https://github.com/tidyverse/tidyr
tidytext	http://github.com/juliasilge/tidytext
tidytrials	https://ghe.metrumrg.com/external-projects/SAN1701F

Using partial matches of function names in the help title field

knitr::kable(help.pages(function_pattern = 'geom'))

Package	URL
bunny	https://github.com/dmi3kno/bunny
GGally	https://ggobi.github.io/ggally https://github.com/ggobi/ggally
ggforce	https://ggforce.data-imaginist.com
ggplot2	http://ggplot2.tidyverse.org https://github.com/tidyverse/ggplot2
ggpubr	https://rpkgs.datanovia.com/ggpubr/
ggrepel	http://github.com/slowkow/ggrepel
igraph	http://igraph.org
magick	https://docs.ropensci.org/magick https://github.com/ropensci/magick
MASS	http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/MASS4/
plotly	https://plotly-r.com https://github.com/ropensci/plotly#readme https://plot.ly/r
psych	https://personality-project.org/r/psych https://personality-project.org/r/psych-manual.pdf
raster	https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=raster
see	https://easystats.github.io/see/
sp	https://github.com/edzer/sp/ https://edzer.github.io/sp/