This post will introduce using the keyring package to hide a password. Short background The keyring package is a library designed to let you access your operating system’s credential store. In essence, it lets you store and retrieve passwords in your operating system, which allows you to avoid having ...

If you follow the stock market, you’ve probably heard the expression “Sell in May, Go Away.” This expression generally refers to the perceived idea that the stock market goes up between the end of October and end of April, but one should sell at the beginning of May to ...

R offers several ways to reverse a string, include some base R options. We go through a few of those in this post. We’ll also compare the computational time for each method. Reversing a string can be especially useful in bioinformatics (e.g. finding the reverse compliment of a ...

With thousands of powerful packages, it’s easy to glaze over the libraries that come preinstalled with R. Thus, this post will talk about some of the cool functions in the utils package, which comes with a standard installation of R. While utils comes with several familiar functions, like read....

The apply functions in R are awesome (see this post for some lesser known apply functions). However, if you can use pure vectorization, then you’ll probably end up making your code run a lot faster than just depending upon functions like sapply and lapply. This is because apply functions ...

This post will go through how to create a word cloud of article titles scraped from the awesome R-bloggers. Our goal will be to use R’s rvest package to search through 50 successive pages on the site for article titles. The stringr and tm packages will be used for string ...

So…you want to play a pRank with R? This short post will give you a fun function you can use in R to help you out! How to change a file’s modified time with R Let’s say we have a file, test.txt. What if we want ...

This post will go through 10 different Linux commands and their R alternatives. If you’re interested in learning more R functions for working with files like some of those below, also check out this post. How to list all the files in a directory Linux R What does it do? ...

So you know lapply, sapply, and apply…but…what about rapply, vapply, or eapply? These are generally a little less known as far as the apply family of functions in R go, so this post will explore how they work. rapply Let’s start with rapply. This function has a ...

In a prior post, we covered how to run Python from the Task Scheduler on Windows. This article is similar, but it’ll show how to run R from the Task Scheduler, instead. Similar to before, let’s first cover how to R from the command line, as knowing this ...

In a previous post, we showed how using vectorization in R can vastly speed up fuzzy matching. Here, we will show you how to use R’s vectorization functionality to efficiently build a logistic regression model. Now we could just use the caret or stats packages to create a model, ...

If you’re an avid R user, you probably use the famous dplyr package. Python has a package meant to be similar to dplyr, called dplython. This article will give an introduction for how to use dplython. For the examples below, we’ll use a sample dataset that comes with ...

Earlier this year, a new package called tabulizer was released in R, which allows you to automatically pull out tables and text from PDFs. Note, this package only works if the PDF’s text is highlightable (if it’s typed) — i.e. it won’t work for scanned-in PDFs, or ...

In a previous post, I gave an introduction to the yahoo_fin package. The most updated version of the package includes new functionality allowing you to scrape live stock prices from Yahoo Finance (real-time). In this article, we’ll go through a couple ways of getting real-time data from Yahoo ...

In a previous post, we showed how RoboBrowser can be used to fill out online forms for getting historical weather data from Wunderground. This article will talk about how to use RoboBrowser to batch download collections of image files from Pexels, a site which offers free downloads. If you’re ...

Though Python is usually thought of over R for doing system administration tasks, R is actually quite useful in this regard. In this post we’re going to talk about using R to create, delete, move, and obtain information on files. How to get and change the current working directory ...

Click here to see my recommended reading list. What is Independent Component Analysis (ICA)? If you’re already familiar with ICA, feel free to skip below to how we implement it in Python. ICA is a type of dimensionality reduction algorithm that transforms a set of variables to a new ...

Subscribe to TheAutomatic.net via the area on the right side of the page. The yahoo_fin package contains functions to scrape stock-related data from Yahoo Finance and NASDAQ. You can view the official documentation by clicking this link, but the below post will provide a few more in-depth examples. ...

Timing Python processes is made possible with several different packages. One of the most common ways is using the standard library package, time, which we’ll demonstrate with an example. However, another package that is very useful for timing a process — and particularly telling you how far along a process ...

I wanted to write a post about a couple of handy functions in R that don’t always get the recognition they deserve. This article will talk about a few functions that form part of R’s core functional programming capabilities. R has thousands of functions, so this is just ...