Analysing R Scripts

Hauke Sonnenberg

2022-06-09

It is quite impressive how, since more or less ten years, more and more people at our research institute Kompetenzzentrum Wasser Berlin began to use the programming language R to support their daily data-related work. As a result, we are currently hosting more than one thousand R scripts in our internal version control system.

It is difficult to keep control over so many files. Therefore, this package contains a function that aims at giving an overview of R script files and the functions defined within these files. Use the function report_about_r_scripts() to create an R Markdown document about all the R script files below a certain root directory:

kwb.fakin::report_about_r_scripts(root = "path/to/your/script/folder")

With the (private) helper functions github_package_path() and github_package_files() that are also contained in the package, we can also report on the R files that are contained in an R package hosted on GitHub. For example, we can have a look at the files that are contained in this package. They are available in the repository kwb.fakin on our GitHub account:

repo <- "kwb-r/kwb.fakin"

kwb.fakin::report_about_r_scripts(
  root = kwb.fakin:::github_package_path(repo, "R"),
  scripts = kwb.fakin:::github_package_files(repo, "R"),
  show = FALSE
)

We set show to FALSE in order to prevent that the created HTML file is opened in a browser.

A shortcut to the above call is:

kwb.fakin::report_about_github_package("kwb-r/kwb.fakin", show = FALSE)

It is up to you to compare with what the great guys do. Try e.g.

kwb.fakin::report_about_github_package("tidyverse/dplyr")

What packages are used by our scripts?

To find out what R-packages are used in our R-scripts, you may use the function get_names_of_used_packages of our kwb.code package:

#devtools::install_github("kwb-r/kwb.code")

# Define the top level directory in which to look recursively for R-scripts
root_dir = "~/Desktop/R-Development/RScripts"

# Get the names of the packages that are loaded in the scripts with "library()"
packages <- kwb.code::get_names_of_used_packages(root_dir)

# Print the script names
writeLines(packages)

Get file properties recursively

The base function file.info can be used to get detailed information about a file. The package kwb.fakin contains a function that calls this function on all files that are below a certain root folder:

# Define the root directory
root_dir <- system.file(package = "kwb.fakin")

# Get information on all files in this directory
file_info <- fakin.path.app::get_recursive_file_info(root_dir)

# Get information on R scripts only...
file_info_scripts <- fakin.path.app::get_recursive_file_info(root_dir, "[.]R$")

print(utils::sessionInfo())

# Show the structure of the result
str(structure(file_info_scripts, class = "data.frame"))