proposed changes to RSiteSearch

But help really needs to be delivered with R, not an addon.
It should not be necessary to know how to install packages
just to get this level of help. I think it needs to be where it
is now.

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 4:02 PM, Liaw, Andy <andy_liaw at merck.com> wrote:
  

 I agree!  Recall, though, I had added the RSiteSearch() functionality
to the Rgui under Windows (Help / search.r-project.org...), so if
RSiteSearch() is taken out, this need to go, too.

Best,
Andy

From: Jonathan Baron
    

There is something to be said for taking all of these functions,
including the original RSiteSearch, out of utils and putting them in
the new RSiteSearch package.  These are the sorts of things that will
get revised frequently, and this way (I think) we won't have to bother
whoever takes care of utils, which is part of the regular R
distribution.

I'm adding Spencer Graves to the cc list.  Maybe he is interested in
doing this.

Jon

On 05/07/09 20:54, Romain Francois wrote:
      

We could have a few functions similar to RSiteSearch or
        

gmaneSearch I
      

just posted and then cook a summary html page with R ...

Here is a function that grabs relevant groups from gmane:

gmaneGroups <- function( prefix = "gmane.comp.lang.r." ){
    url <- URLencode( sprintf(
"http://dir.gmane.org/index.php?prefix=%s", prefix) )
    txt <- grep( '^<tr.*<td align=right.*<a', readLines(
        

url ), value =
      

TRUE )

    rx <- '^.*?<a href="(.*?)">(.*?)</a>.*<td>(.*?)</td>.*$'
    out <- data.frame(
        url = gsub( rx, "\\1", txt ),
        group = gsub( rx, "\\2", txt ),
        description = gsub( rx, "\\3", txt ),
        stringsAsFactors = FALSE
        )
    out$group <- sub( "...", ".*", out$group, fixed = TRUE )
    out
}

I'll clean this up and write a man page if there is
        

interest in adding
      

this to R, but this might be more appropriate in a package,
        

for example:
      

http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/rsitesearch/

Romain

Liaw, Andy wrote:
        

From: Jonathan Baron

          

On 05/07/09 13:48, Liaw, Andy wrote:

            

From: Duncan Murdoch

              

I'll incorporate the changes if you like

                

Yes.  Please do.  I understand that it won't take effect
            

for a while.
      

When it does, I'll change my site.

  What do you think

            

of the idea
of adding a gmane (or other archive) search to your results
page?  Then
if someone doesn't like what the man pages show, you can

                

send them

            

somewhere else, rather than leaving them to find out the
other resources
themselves.

gmane has sample code for this on their search page
search.gmane.org, so
it looks reasonably easy.  I'd suggest following their

                

last example,

            

with a drop-down box to select mailing lists, with
comp.lang.r.* as an
option for "all lists".

Duncan Murdoch

                

Good idea.  I will do this.  But there are also two
            

other good search
      

engines.  Maybe I'll add all three search alternatives.
            

But then,
      

according to Sheena Iyengar, people won't choose any!  Hmm.


            

Actually, I was thinking about a possible RHelpSearch() in

              

addition, if

            

Jon is no longer going to include the R-help archive in the

              

search.  I

            

used the current RSiteSearch() a lot more for searching

              

R-help archive

            

than functions in packages.  Ideas?  comments?

              

This is OK with me, but I don't want to do it.  I guess it would
search gmane.  MarkMail is also pretty good, as is
http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/ All these are much better than
Namazu for searching the R-help list.

            

Sorry I didn't make it clear:  I meant something like the
          

gmaneSearcg()
      

that Romain posted, not hitting your site.

Best,
Andy


          

Jon

            

--
Romain Francois
Independent R Consultant
+33(0) 6 28 91 30 30
http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr

        

--
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
Editor: Judgment and Decision Making (http://journal.sjdm.org)

      

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