Working together to push science forward
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at
Geospatial data - data embedded in a spatial context - is used across disciplines, whether it be history, biology, business, tech, public health, etc. Along with community contributors, we’re working on a suite of tools to make working with spatial data in R as easy as possible. If you’re not familiar with geospatial tools, it’s helpful to see what people do with them in the real world. Example 1 One of our geospatial packages, geonames, is used for geocoding, the practice of either sorting out place names from geographic data, or vice versa....
HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a protocol by which most of us interact with the web. When we do requests to a website in a browser on desktop or mobile, or get some data from a server in R, all of that is using HTTP. HTTP has a rich suite of status codes describing different HTTP conditions, ranging from Success to various client errors, to server errors. R has a few HTTP client libraries - crul, curl, httr, and RCurl - each of which is slightly different....
Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of extracting written or typed text from images such as photos and scanned documents into machine-encoded text. The new rOpenSci package tesseract brings one of the best open-source OCR engines to R. This enables researchers or journalists, for example, to search and analyze vast numbers of documents that are only available in printed form. People looking to extract text and metadata from pdf files in R should try our pdftools package....
You can find members of the rOpenSci team at various meetings and workshops around the world. Come say ‘hi’, learn about how our packages can enable your research, or about our onboarding process for contributing new packages, discuss software sustainability or tell us how we can help you do open and reproducible research.
...A new package crul is on CRAN. crul is another HTTP client for R, but is relatively simplified compared to httr, and is being built to link closely with webmockr and vcr. webmockr and vcr are packages ported from Ruby’s webmock and vcr, respectively. They both make mocking HTTP requests really easy. A major use case for mocking HTTP requests is for unit tests. Nearly all the packages I work on personally make HTTP requests in their test suites, so I wanted to make it really easy to mock HTTP requests....
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at