All posts (Page 90 of 121)
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Why care about patents?
1. Patents play a critical role in incentivizing innovation, without which we wouldn’t have much of the technology we rely on everyday
What does your iPhone, Google’s PageRank algorithm, and a butter substitute called Smart Balance all have in common?
The R package ecosystem now contains more than 10K packages, and several flagship packages belong under the rOpenSci suite. Some of these are: magick for image manipulation, plotly for interactive plots, and git2r for interacting with git.
rOpenSci is a community of people making software to facilitate open and reproducible science/research. While the rOpenSci team continues to develop and maintain core infrastructure packages, an increasing number of packages in our suite are contributed by members of the extended R community.
...We have started working on a new rOpenSci package called writexl. This package wraps the very powerful libxlsxwriter library which allows for exporting data to Microsoft Excel format.
The major benefit of writexl over other packages is that it is completely written in C and has absolutely zero dependencies. No Java, Perl or Rtools are required.
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Getting Started
The write_xlsx function writes a data frame to an xlsx file. You can test that data roundtrips properly by reading it back using the readxl package. Columns containing dates and factors get automatically coerced to character strings.
It all started January 26th this year when I signed up to volunteer as a reviewer for R packages submitted to rOpenSci. My main motivation for wanting to volunteer was to learn something new and to contribute to the R open source community. If you are wondering why the people behind rOpenSci are doing this, you can read How rOpenSci uses Code Review to Promote Reproducible Science.
Three months later I was contacted by Maëlle Salmon asking whether I was interested in
reviewing the R package patentsview for rOpenSci. And yes, I
was! To be honest I was a little bit thrilled.
The new rOpenSci spelling package provides utilities for spell checking common document formats including latex, markdown, manual pages, and DESCRIPTION files. It also includes tools especially for package authors to automate spell checking of R documentation and vignettes.
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Spell Checking Packages
The main purpose of this package is to quickly find spelling errors in R packages. The spell_check_package() function extracts all text from your package manual pages and vignettes, compares it against a language (e.g. en_US or en_GB), and lists potential errors in a nice tidy format:
Working together to push science forward
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at
