CRAN Feature Request: install.data (task.view="Cluster")
On 28/10/2018 5:08 PM, Abs Spurdle wrote:
Hi I wish that it was possible to install datasets from R packages without installing the rest of the packages. Mainly for testing purposes or writing examples. Assuming that there's a top level data directory (which there isn't):
install.data (package=c ("s20x", "R330") )
Which would install all datasets from the s20x and R330 packages, without installing the complete packages, with some form of documentation and presumably with license info. Or:
install.data (task.view="Cluster")
Which would install all the datasets from the Cluster task view, again without installing the complete packages, with some form of documentation and presumably with license info. Documentation could be the Rd files or a reduced form of the pdf/html files, covering the datasets only. Also, it would be good to have search tools too.
search.data (task.view="Cluster", keyword="something", all.Rd.fields=TRUE, condition="n.numeric.vars >= 3")
Which would return a list of datasets from the Cluster task view with keyword "something" (from anywhere in the Rd file) and 3 or more numeric variables, including info on the (dataset) name, package (name), license, header, dimensions and possibly description. Obviously, these functions would not be part of CRAN itself, however, CRAN would need to store packages in a different way for this to work. Unless I'm missing something?
This is something you should write yourself. Do it by downloading the package, unpacking it, then extracting the data. I suspect everything you need is already built into R, in the code that installs a package. You just need to rewrite it to do much less. You shouldn't ask CRAN to do it, they've got enough on their plates. Duncan Murdoch