Today a new version of the jsonlite package was released to CRAN. This update includes a few internal enhancements and one new feature. Doubles vs integers The new always_decimal parameter forces formatting of doubles in decimal notation....

Following a few weeks of testing, OpenCPU 1.6 has been released. OpenCPU is a production-ready system for embedded statistical computing with R. It provides a neat API for remotely calling R functions over HTTP via e.g. JSON or Protocol Buffers. The OpenCPU server implementation is stable and has been thorougly ...

Yesterday a new version of the jsonlite package was released to CRAN. This update includes no new features, it only introduces performance optimizations. Large Matrices The jsonlite package was already highly optimized for converting vect...

Last week we introduced the new hunspell R package. This week a new version was released which adds support for additional languages and text analysis features. Additional languages By default hunspell uses the US English dictionary en_US but the new version allows for checking and analyzing in other languages ...

Hunspell is the spell checker library used in LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Mac OS X, InDesign, and a few more. Base R has some spell checking functionality via the aspell function which wraps the aspell or hunspell command line program on supported systems. The new hunspell R package ...

Version 1.5.4 of the OpenCPU server has been released to Launchpad (Ubuntu) and OBS (Fedora). This update does not introduce any changes to the OpenCPU API itself; it improves to the deb/rpm installation packages and upgrades the bundled opencpu system R package library. Installing and Updating Existing Ubuntu and Fedora ...

A few months ago I first announced the commonmark R package. Since then there have been a few more releases… time for an update! What is CommonMark? Markdown is used in many places these days, however the original spec actually leaves some ambiguity which makes it difficult to optimize and ...

The V8 package provides an R interface to Google’s open source JavaScript engine. The package is completely self contained and requires no runtime dependencies, making it very easy to execute JavaScript code from R. A hand full of CRAN packages use V8 to provide R bindings to useful JavaScript ...

A while ago I blogged about the brotli, a new general purpose compression algorithm which Google promotes as an alternative to gzip. The same company also happens to be working on a new format for images called webp, which is actually a derivative of the VP8 video format. Google claims ...

The new rsvg package renders (vector based) SVG images into high-quality bitmap arrays. The resulting image is an array of 3 dimensions: height * width * 4 (RGBA) and can be written to png, jpeg or webp format:

<span># create an svg image</span>
<span>library</span><span>(</span>svglite<span>)</span>
<span>library</span><span>(</span>ggplot2<span>)</span>
svglite<span>(</span><span>"plot.svg"</span><span>,</span> width <span>=</span> <span>10</span><span>,</span> height <span>=</span> <span>7</span><span>)</span>
qplot<span>(</span>mpg<span>,</span> wt<span>,</span> data <span>=</span> mtcars<span>,</span> colour <span>=</span> <span>factor</span><span>(</span>cyl<span>))</span>
dev.off<span>()</span>

<span># render it into a bitmap array</span>
<span>library</span><span>(</span>rsvg<span>)</span>
bitmap <span><-</span> rsvg<span>(</span><span>"plot.svg"</span><span>)</span>
<span>dim</span><span>(</span>bitmap<span>)</span>
<span>## [1] 504 720   4</span>

<span># write to format</span>
png<span>::</span>writePNG<span>(</span>bitmap<span>,</span> <span>"bitmap.png"</span><span>)</span>
jpeg<span>::</span>writeJPEG<span>(</span>bitmap<span>,</span> <span>"bitmap.jpg"</span><span>,</span> quality <span>=</span> <span>1</span><span>)</span>
webp<span>::</span>write_webp<span>(</span>bitmap<span>,</span> <span>"bitmap.webp"</span><span>,</span> quality <span>=</span> <span>100</span><span>)</span>

The advantage of storing your plots in svg format is they can be rendered later ...

Brotli is a new compression algorithm optimized for the web, in particular small text documents. Brotli decompression is at least as fast as for gzip while significantly improving the compression ratio. The price we pay is that compression is much slower than gzip. Brotli is therefore most effective for serving ...

This week a new package called sodium was released on CRAN. This package implements bindings to libsodium: a modern, easy-to-use software library for encryption, decryption, signatures, password hashing and more. Libsodium is actually a portable fork of Daniel Bernstein’s famous NaCL crypto library, which provides core operations needed to ...

Version 0.9.2 of curl has been released to CRAN. The curl package implements a modern and flexible web client for R and is the foundation for the popular httr package. This update includes mostly tweaks for Windows. Faster downloading Alex Deng from Microsoft had diagnosed a problem with curl_fetch_memory (...

A new version of the mongolite package has appeared on CRAN. Mongolite builds on jsonlite to provide a simple, high-performance MongoDB client for R, which makes storing small or large data in a database as easy as converting it to/from JSON. Have a look at the vignette or useR2015 ...

Following a few weeks of testing, OpenCPU 1.5 has been released. OpenCPU is a production-ready framework for embedded statistical computing with R. The system provides a neat API for remotely calling R functions over HTTP via e.g. JSON or P...

R gained some basic support for https in version 3.2.0 (see NEWS) via the method = "libcurl" argument in base functions download.file and url. The global option download.file.method is used to make this the default. Unfortunately the implementation has a few limitations: there is no way to set request ...

TL;DR: Check out the vignette or the development version of httr. The package I put most time and effort in this year is curl. Last week version 0.8 was published on CRAN which fixes the last outstanding bug for Solaris. The package is pretty much done at this point: stable, ...

Last week the commonmark package was released on CRAN. The package implements some very thin R bindings to John Macfarlane’s (author of pandoc) cmark library. From the cmark readme: cmark is the C reference implementation of CommonMark, a rationalized version of Markdown syntax with a spec. It provides a ...

The first stable version of the new mongolite package has appeared on CRAN. Mongolite builds on jsonlite to provide a simple, high-performance MongoDB client for R, which makes storing and accessing small or large data as easy as converting it ...