CRAN Search

June 30, 2010

By C

(This article was first published on R-Chart, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Here's a ditty to search the cran R packages by description

cranSearch = function(q='')
{
  library(XML)
  u<-'http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/'
  d<-readHTMLTable(u)
  d[[1]]$V1

  lib.names <- as.vector(d[[1]]$V1)
  lib.descriptions <- as.vector(d[[1]]$V2)
  lib.names[grep(q,lib.descriptions)]
}

So to search for all packages that have XML in the description.

cranSearch('XML')

The search is case sensitive.

cranSearch('World Bank')

In fact it is a regular expression.

cranSearch('stock|Stock')

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