This week in R (2024-11-22)

Happy Friday everyone! Here's some news from the world of R this week:

• You're a wizard, Quarto: Micka?l Canouil has created a new VS Code extension which helps you to manage your Quarto projects. It includes functionality for installing extensions and creating new documents which may come in handy if you're writing Quarto documents in VS Code (or in future, Positron).
• Scouting for bars: David Granjon has developed a new R package {scoutbaR} which wraps the 'scoutbar' React widget. The package makes it easy to include a scoutbar element in your shiny app - an exciting way to modernise and improve your existing shiny apps. Check out the documentation for an example of what it looks like.
• You Quarto know this: Posit's Charlotte Wickham has published a series of video tutorials focussed around Quarto websites. They cover the basics of setting up a homepage and navigating between pages, to customising with CSS and using the inbuilt listings functionality. If you're looking to create a new website or blog and want to use Quarto to do so, I recommend checking out these tutorials to get started!
• PaLLM of your hand: Simon Couch has developed a new R package {pal} which aims to provide a selection of LLM-backed helpers for completing repetitive tasks in R. One example is an addin that generates roxygen documentation for your functions, giving you a good starting point to build from. Usage of LLMs continues to increase across the board in R!
• LondonR: last week I attended the LondonR meetup, where Hannah Frick gave an excellent talk on the state of the union for {tidymodels}, including the {tailor} and {sparsevctrs} packages. You can see Hannah's slides here, and shout out to Datacove for organising the meetup!
• Fun fact:?did you know you can use {stringr}s str_view() function to see how your regex pattern matches a string?

library(stringr)

str_view("This is some text", pattern = "[aeiou]")
#> [1] │ Th<i>s <i>s s<o>m<e> t<e>xt        

New versions:

• {galah} v2.1.0 - improvements and documentation updates for the very useful biodiversity data package.

• {tinytable} 0.6.0 - internal refactors, bug fixes and consistency improvements to this small, minimalistic table drawing package.

I post updates like this every week so if you're interested feel free to follow. Comment below if there's something interesting you found out this week too!