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dverse

The goal of dverse is to document a universe. It creates a data frame containing the metadata associated with the documentation of a collection of R packages. It allows for linking topic names to their corresponding documentation online.

If you have a meta-package, dverse helps you to create a comprehensive reference for its website.

Installation

Install from CRAN:

or get a development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("maurolepore/dverse")

Motivation

The Tidyverse popularized the idea of a “universe of packages.” The typical universe has a meta-package that centralizes access to functions and data across all its packages. For example, with library(tidyverse) the tidyverse meta-package centralizes access to the functions in dplyr, ggplot2, and several other packages in the Tidyverse universe.

However, meta-packages typically don’t centralize documentation. For example, the tidyverse website only shows the documentation for the tidyverse meta-package itself but does not show the documentation for dplyr, ggplot2, and other packages in the Tidyverse.

The dverse package solves this problem. It creates a data frame containing the metadata associated with the documentation of any set of packages. This data frame can be easily used to generate the universe-wide reference for the meta-package website, for example using pkgdown.

Example

document_universe() creates a data frame with documentation metadata of one or more packages.

library(glue)
library(tibble)

packages <- c("glue", "tibble")
url_template <- "https://{package}.tidyverse.org/reference/{topic}.html"
docs <- dverse::document_universe(packages, url_template)

docs
#> # A tibble: 46 × 7
#>    topic                               alias title concept type  keyword package
#>    <chr>                               <chr> <chr> <chr>   <chr> <chr>   <chr>  
#>  1 <a href=https://tibble.tidyverse.o… add_… Add … additi… help  <NA>    tibble 
#>  2 <a href=https://tibble.tidyverse.o… add_… Add … additi… help  <NA>    tibble 
#>  3 <a href=https://glue.tidyverse.org… as_g… Coer… <NA>    help  <NA>    glue   
#>  4 <a href=https://tibble.tidyverse.o… as_t… Coer… <NA>    help  <NA>    tibble 
#>  5 <a href=https://tibble.tidyverse.o… char… Form… vector… help  <NA>    tibble 
#>  6 <a href=https://tibble.tidyverse.o… depr… Depr… <NA>    help  intern… tibble 
#>  7 digits                              digi… Comp… <NA>    vign… <NA>    tibble 
#>  8 <a href=https://tibble.tidyverse.o… enfr… Conv… <NA>    help  <NA>    tibble 
#>  9 engines                             engi… Cust… <NA>    vign… <NA>    glue   
#> 10 extending                           exte… Exte… <NA>    vign… <NA>    tibble 
#> # ℹ 36 more rows

knitr::kable() turns the URLs into clickable links.

knitr::kable(head(docs, 3))
topic alias title concept type keyword package
add_column add_column Add columns to a data frame addition help NA tibble
add_row add_row, add_case Add rows to a data frame addition help NA tibble
as_glue as_glue Coerce object to glue NA help NA glue

DT::datatabe() also provides a search box. See Get started.