Automatically generating package information from a smaller list

[njtierney]

@imkemayer and @SteffenMoritz: do you have any thoughts on how / if the package information can be added with some reference to a CRAN package link? Or would each page need to be generated manually?

Tools like pkgdown demonstrate that we could probably generate a short package description from a github/CRAN link. Hopefully that should mean that we don't have to generate the package description material each time.

[tuxette]

The R function packageDescription can do the job if I understand well what you mean to do.

[njtierney]

Yes! So something like this:

packageDescription("naniar", fields = "Description")
#> [1] "Missing values are ubiquitous in data and need to be explored and\n    handled in the initial stages of analysis. 'naniar' provides data structures \n    and functions that facilitate the plotting of missing values and examination \n    of imputations. This allows missing data dependencies to be explored with \n    minimal deviation from the common work patterns of 'ggplot2' and tidy data. "

^{Created on 2019-09-24 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[njtierney]

Here is an example of how to do this:

library(glue)
library(stringr)
library(tibble)
library(purrr)

get_desc <- function(pkg){
  if (!requireNamespace(pkg, quietly = TRUE)) {
    stop(glue::glue("The package {pkg} is not installed"))
  }
  packageDescription(pkg, fields = "Description") %>%
    stringr::str_remove_all("\n") %>%
    stringr::str_remove_all("  ") %>%
    stringr::str_trim()
}

df_pkg <- tibble(pkgs = c("naniar", "mice", "mi"),
                 desc = map_chr(pkgs, get_desc))

df_pkg
#> # A tibble: 3 x 2
#>   pkgs   desc                                                              
#>   <chr>  <chr>                                                             
#> 1 naniar Missing values are ubiquitous in data and need to be explored and…
#> 2 mice   Multiple imputation using Fully Conditional Specification (FCS)im…
#> 3 mi     The mi package provides functions for data manipulation, imputing…

^{Created on 2019-09-24 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[tuxette]

solved in page rpkg. What remains to do:

• check if this can be done in corresponding subpages
• need to discuss on issue How to access/reference pages without button in navigation bar #3 to check if HTML has to be pushed alongside with Rmd file