websearchr

Overview

The purpose of websearchr is to provide a convenient way of accessing domains and searching popular websites directly from the R console. When working on small screens in particular, switching from the R console to the browser window, opening a new tab, navigating to the desired website and finally searching for the search terms requires around 3-6 clicks. As one is working mainly in the R console, it is more convenient to start typing the search terms right away, without having to go through the process mentioned above. For example, stackoverflow("my r problem") will open the Stackoverflow search for “my r problem” in a new browser tab automatically.

Currently supported websites:

• Bing
• Crossref
• Duckduckgo
• GitHub
• Google
• Google Scholar
• Qwant
• r-bloggers.com
• Rdocumentation.org
• rdrr.io
• Reddit
• Stackoverflow
• Startpage
• Twitter
• Wikipedia
• Wolfram Alpha

Any other domain can be accessed with web("example.com"). You can also simply open the search engine in the browser by not specifying a search term, e.g. using duckduckgo().

Search last error or warning

You can easily search for the last produced error or warning using last_error() or last_warning() inside one of the search functions, e.g. startpage(last_error()).

Language support

Twitter and Wikipedia can be searched in different languages than English. For example, to search the French version of Wikipedia use wikipedia("Langage de programmation", "fr").

Browser

To use a browser other than the default on your computer use options(browser = "path to browser"). For example, on macOS options(browser = "/usr/bin/open -a '/Applications/Safari.app'") or Windows options(browser = "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe"). To check which browser is set as the default use getOption("browser").

Installation

You can install websearchr from CRAN with:

install.packages("websearchr")

Or install the development version from GitHub:

remotes::install_github("fschaffner/websearchr")

Please report issues or requests for additional functionality to https://github.com/fschaffner/websearchr/issues.

Example

library("websearchr")

# Try:

web("r-project.org")
#> Opening https://www.r-project.org in browser

google("my search terms")
#> Opening Google search for "my search terms" in browser

stackoverflow("my r problem")
#> Opening Stackoverflow search for "my r problem" in browser

The Meme