R Package with Shared Utility Routines

Introduction

Here we store some utilities shared by our other packages.

One important export is the function ignoreErrors(exp) which executes the expression and ignores all errors or warnings. This is useful when dealing with expressions that maybe assign some result (like ignoreErrors(result <- dodgyFunction())) but may fail for reasons which can safely be ignored.

Another useful utility is the path.batchApply which follows a visitor design pattern to (recursively) feed a supplied function with all files in a directory that fit to an (also supplied) regular expression. The result is returned as a list, much like the lapply, if wanted. path.batchApply can also automatically parallelize the computation by using mclapply from the parallel package internally. This allows for a more convenient and automatic batch processing of data in folders. path.batchProcessor can create a wrapper for an input/output-file-style processor to adapt it to the path.batchApply interface. The other functions like path.commonPrefix, path.extensionRegExp, and path.relativize also are building blocks that are used by and fit to the path.batchApply code.

This library also includes some shared classes, such as functionOrNULL and numericOrNULL, which we use in some of our other classes to allow for members which can either be NULL or, well, a function or numeric vector.

Installation

You can install the package directl from GitHub by using the package devtools as follows:

library(devtools)
install_github("thomasWeise/utilizeR")

If devtools is not yet installed on your machine, you need to FIRST do

install.packages("devtools")

If you get the error Installation failed: NULL : 'rcmd_safe_env' is not an exported object from 'namespace:callr' during the installation attempt, please do the following:

1. Install the package callr by typing install.packages("callr") in the R console and hitting enter.
2. Exit your R session and start R again.
3. Try the installation of utilizeR again as described above.

License

The copyright holder of this package is Prof. Dr. Thomas Weise (see Contact). The package is licensed under the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, 29 June 2007.

Contact

If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact Prof. Dr. Thomas Weise of the Institute of Applied Optimization at Hefei University in Hefei, Anhui, China via email to tweise@hfuu.edu.cn.