pkgmatch

A tool to help find R packages by matching packages either to a text description, or to entire packages. Can find matching packages either from rOpenSci’s suite of packages, or from all packages currently on CRAN.

Installation

The easiest way to install this package is via the associated r-universe. As shown there, simply enable the universe with

options (repos = c (
    ropenscireviewtools = "https://ropensci-review-tools.r-universe.dev",
    CRAN = "https://cloud.r-project.org"
))

And then install the usual way with,

install.packages ("pkgmatch")

Alternatively, the package can be installed by first installing either the remotes or pak packages and running one of the following lines:

remotes::install_github ("ropensci-review-tools/pkgmatch")
pak::pkg_install ("ropensci-review-tools/pkgmatch")
remotes::install_git ("https://codeberg.org/ropensci-review-tools/pkgmatch")
remotes::install_git ("https://codefloe.com/ropensci-review-tools/pkgmatch")

The package can then loaded for use with

library (pkgmatch)

Using the pkgmatch package

The ‘pkgmatch’ package takes input either from a text description or local path to an R package, and finds matching packages based on text and code matching algorithms.

The package has two main functions:

• pkgmatch_similar_pkgs() to find similar rOpenSci, CRAN, or BioConductor packages based on input as either a local path to an entire package, the name of an installed package, or as a single descriptive text string; and
• pkgmatch_similar_fns() to find similar functions from rOpenSci or BioConductor packages based on descriptive text input. (Not available for functions from CRAN packages.)

The following code demonstrates how these functions work, first matching general text strings packages from rOpenSci:

input <- "
Packages for analysing evolutionary trees, with a particular focus
on visualising inter-relationships among distinct trees.
"
pkgmatch_similar_pkgs (input, corpus = "ropensci")

## [1] "ssarp"     "rotl"      "phylogram" "canaper"   "taxa"

input <- "Visualise evolutionary trees"
pkgmatch_similar_fns (input, corpus = "ropensci")

## [1] "visdat::vis_binary"            "visdat::vis_cor"              
## [3] "tracerer::count_trees_in_file" "phylotaR::cTrees"             
## [5] "tracerer::parse_beast_trees"

The corpus parameter must be specified as one of “ropensci”, “cran”, or “bioc” (for BioConductor; all case-insensitive). The CRAN corpus is much larger than the rOpenSci or BioConductor corpora, and matching for corpus = "cran" will generally take notably longer.

Matching entire packages

The input parameter can also specify an entire package, either as a local path to a package directory, or the name of an installed package. For any locally-installed packages, you can just use the name of the package:

pkgmatch_similar_pkgs (input = "httr2", corpus = "cran")

## [1] "httr2"  "vcr"    "crul"   "gargle" "curl"

Alternatively, the input parameter can be a local path to a package repository. To demonstrate that, the following code downloads a .tar.gz file of the same httr2 package from CRAN:

pkg <- "httr2"
p <- available.packages () |>
    data.frame () |>
    dplyr::filter (Package == pkg)
url_base <- "https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/"
url <- paste0 (url_base, p$Package, "_", p$Version, ".tar.gz")
path <- fs::path (fs::path_temp (), basename (url))
download.file (url, destfile = path, quiet = TRUE)

The path to that package (in this case as a compressed tarball) can then be passed to the pkgmatch_similar_pkgs() function:

pkgmatch_similar_pkgs (path, corpus = "cran")

## [1] "httr2"  "vcr"    "crul"   "gargle" "curl"

Websites of packages or functions returned by either the pkgmatch_similar_pkgs() of pkgmatch_similar_fns() functions can be automatically opened, either by calling the function with browse = TRUE, or by storing the return value of these functions as an object and passing that to the pkgmatch_browse() function.

Package vignettes

The pkgmatch package includes the following vignettes:

• A main pkgmatch vignette which gives an overview of how to use the package.
• Example applications which describes several different example applications of pkgmatch, and illustrates the ways by which this package provides different kind of results to search engines and to general language model interfaces.
• Data caching and updating which describes how pkgmatch caches and updates the language model results for the individual corpora.

Similar tools

• The utils::RSiteSearch() function.
• The sos package that queries the “RSiteSearch” database.
• The pkgsearch package to “search R packages on CRAN” using CRAN metadata.
• The packagefinder package for matching to DESCRIPTION entries of CRAN packages.
• The R Warehouse, a web-based and LLM-powered search tool for R packages.

Contributors

All contributions to this project are gratefully acknowledged using the allcontributors package following the allcontributors specification. Contributions of any kind are welcome!

Code

mpadge

MargaretSiple-NOAA

Bisaloo

Issue Authors

maelle

Selbosh

nhejazi

Issue Contributors

agricolamz