Names of R's Available Packages

Names of R's available packages

A better way than scraping a web page to get the names of packages is to use the available.packages() function and process those results. available.packages() returns a matrix contains details of all packages available (but is filtered by default — see the Details section of ?available.packages for more).

pkgs <- available.packages(filters = "duplicates")
nameCount <- unname(nchar(pkgs[, "Package"]))
table(nameCount)

> table(nameCount)
nameCount
  2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21 
 32 311 374 360 434 445 368 277 199 132  99  56  56  43  22  19  18   2  12   8 
 22  24  25  31 
  5   2   1   1

Using nameCount we can select packages with names containing any number of characters without needing to resort to regexp etc:

> unname(pkgs[which(nameCount == 2), "Package"])
 [1] "BB" "bs" "ca" "cg" "dr" "ez" "FD" "ff" "HH" "HI" "iv" "JM" "ks" "M3" "mi"
[16] "np" "oc" "oz" "PK" "PP" "qp" "QT" "RC" "rv" "Rz" "sm" "sn" "sp" "st" "SV"
[31] "tm" "wq"

What constitutes a good package name according to CRAN?

Writing R Extensions only provides the following constraints:

The mandatory ‘Package’ field gives the name of the package. This should contain only (ASCII) letters, numbers and dot, have at least two characters and start with a letter and not end in a dot.

Note that the underscore character, _, is not allowed.

You might start your research by examining the listing here - in particular, few package names include the dot char, ..

Also, take look at this SO question for some helpful code. What's more, @agstudy provided a link to Hadley Wickham's tips on his favorite package naming conventions here.

By the way, in case you're planning to submit the package to CRAN,
the CRAN team might suggest a name change if it's not appropriate.

Why does rownames(installed.packages()) have a names attribute?

Odd, but seems like rownames(installed.packages()) has a names attribute the first time you call it.

> str(rownames(installed.packages()))
 Named chr [1:125] "bdsmatrix" "bitops" "blotter" "brew" "car" "changepoint" "chron" "colorout" ...
 - attr(*, "names")= chr [1:125] "" "" "" "" ...
> str(rownames(installed.packages()))
 chr [1:125] "bdsmatrix" "bitops" "blotter" "brew" "car" "changepoint" "chron" "colorout" "colorspace" ...

---

Sorry, that left it to you to answer the question. Just make sure there are no names. This is a problem for you because you're relying on sapply's default of USE.NAMES=TRUE, but that only adds names if they're not already present. And they're present for some really weird reason.

authoredPackages <- function (author) 
{
    r <- setNames(rownames(installed.packages()), NULL)
    s <- sapply(r, function(x) packageDescription(x)$Author)
    names(grep(author, s, value = TRUE))
}

Here's my sessionInfo (from starting with R --vanilla):

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.1.1 (2014-07-10)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_3.1.1

---

I just upgraded to R-3.1.2 and tried again. I still get the same odd results, and I get them consistently if I use @MartinMorgan's suggestion to use noCache=TRUE.

> str(rownames(installed.packages(noCache=TRUE)))
 Named chr [1:125] "bdsmatrix" "bitops" "blotter" "brew" "car" "changepoint" "chron" "colorout" ...
 - attr(*, "names")= chr [1:125] "" "" "" "" ...
> str(rownames(installed.packages(noCache=TRUE)))
 Named chr [1:125] "bdsmatrix" "bitops" "blotter" "brew" "car" "changepoint" "chron" "colorout" ...
 - attr(*, "names")= chr [1:125] "" "" "" "" ...
> str(rownames(installed.packages(noCache=TRUE)))
 Named chr [1:125] "bdsmatrix" "bitops" "blotter" "brew" "car" "changepoint" "chron" "colorout" ...
 - attr(*, "names")= chr [1:125] "" "" "" "" ...
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.1.2 (2014-10-31)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C               LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8    LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C             LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] setwidth_1.0-3 colorout_1.0-1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_3.1.2

How can I extract the names of all package authors from CRAN

Taken from reverse_dependencies_with_maintainers, which was available at one point on the R developer site (I don't see it there now):

  description <- sprintf("%s/web/packages/packages.rds",
                          getOption("repos")["CRAN"])
  con <- if(substring(description, 1L, 7L) == "file://") {
       file(description, "rb")
  } else {
      url(description, "rb")
  }
  db <- as.data.frame(readRDS(gzcon(con)),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
  close(con)
  rownames(db) <- NULL

  head(db$Author)
  head(db$"Authors@R")

Where Authors@R exists it might be parseable into something better using dget()

getAuthor <- function(x){
  if(is.na(x)) return(NA)
  a <- textConnection(x)
  on.exit(close(a))
  dget(a)
}
authors <- lapply(db$"Authors@R", getAuthor)
head(authors)

[[1]]
[1] NA

[[2]]
[1] "Gaurav Sood <gsood07@gmail.com> [aut, cre]"

[[3]]
[1] "Csillery Katalin <kati.csillery@gmail.com> [aut]"
[2] "Lemaire Louisiane [aut]"                         
[3] "Francois Olivier [aut]"                          
[4] "Blum Michael <michael.blum@imag.fr> [aut, cre]"  

[[4]]
[1] NA

[[5]]
[1] "Csillery Katalin <kati.csillery@gmail.com> [aut]"
[2] "Lemaire Louisiane [aut]"                         
[3] "Francois Olivier [aut]"                          
[4] "Blum Michael <michael.blum@imag.fr> [aut, cre]"  

[[6]]
[1] NA

Elegant way to load a string list of packages in R

Here is one option

Pkgs <- c('caret','readxl')
lib <- .libPaths()[1]

i1 <- !(Pkgs %in% row.names(installed.packages()))
if(any(i1)) {
  install.packages(Pkgs[i1], dependencies = TRUE, lib = lib) 
  }

Show names of everything in a package

ls("package:foreach", all.names=TRUE) only shows what's attached to the search path, which only includes the objects exported from the namespace. Use ls on the results of getNamespace instead:

ls(getNamespace("foreach"), all.names=TRUE)

How to find out which package version is loaded in R?

You can use sessionInfo() to accomplish that.

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.0 (2012-03-30)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C               LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8    LC_PAPER=C                 LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C             LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

attached base packages:
[1] graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  stats     grid      methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] ggplot2_0.9.0  reshape2_1.2.1 plyr_1.7.1    

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] colorspace_1.1-1   dichromat_1.2-4    digest_0.5.2       MASS_7.3-18        memoise_0.1        munsell_0.3       
 [7] proto_0.3-9.2      RColorBrewer_1.0-5 scales_0.2.0       stringr_0.6       
> 

However, as per comments and the answer below, there are better options

> packageVersion("snow")

[1] ‘0.3.9’

Or:

"Rmpi" %in% loadedNamespaces()

Where are the installed R packages?

You can view the location by running the following:

.libPaths()
#[1] "C:/Users/ujjwal/Documents/R/win-library/3.1" "C:/Program Files/R/R-3.1.1/library"   

R packages are installed into libraries, which are directories in the file system containing a subdirectory for each package installed there.

R comes with a single library, R_HOME/library which is the value of the R object .Library containing the standard and recommended packages. At the lowest level .libPaths() can be used to add paths to the collection of libraries or to report the current collection.

R will automatically make use of a site-specific library R_HOME/site-library if this exists. This location can be overridden by setting .Library.site in R_HOME/etc/Rprofile.site. For more details see here.

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