easyr
Helpful functions from Oliver Wyman Actuarial Consulting.
easyr makes difficult operations easy.
Function categories:
- shorthand: protect your hands and move faster by typing less when using common functions.
- type conversion: convert fields to dates, numbers, characters, and logical.
- data wrangling: join and replace, explore data, factor-friendly joins and binds, etc.
- workflow: cacheing, run folder, validate data, etc.
Data:
- nastrings: common NA character values.
- states: U.S. State abbreviations
- cblind: color set built by and optimized for color-blind users.
Built, shared, and managed by Oliver Wyman Actuarial Consulting.
Now accepting proposed contributions through GitHub!
Highlights
- read.any reads many file types, automatically selecting the best read function for you, and auto-types incoming data so you don't have to.
- jrepl joins a mapping and adds a column or replaces values where matches occur. It is optimized to use a combination inner and left join and will error out if data is duplicated in the join.
- cc replaces paste0 to reduce typing.
- dict returns information about a dataset's columns. fldict does the same for a folder of datasets.
- eq handles NAs, where chaos ensues with
==. - crun concatenates and runs a vector of characters as a command.
- fmat converts dates and numbers to pretty strings.
- tonum, todate, tobool flexibly convert character vectors with minimial work.
- Check out the detailed list of functions below for more.
Installation
You can install the latest version available on CRAN:
install.packages('easyr')
require(easyr)
Or install the latest version from github:
devtools::install_github( "oliver-wyman-actuarial/easyr" )
require(easyr)
Support
Submit an Issue or Pull Request via GitHub and the community will review it.
Functions
Here are the functions in easyr by category. Use ?functionName to view detailed documentation for a function.
Shorthand
Common operations shortened for elegance, simplicity, and speed.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| cc | Shorthand paste0/paste function to make typing these common function easier. Intuitively understands how to combine various-length inputs. |
| coalf | dplyr function "coalesce" but handles factors appropriately. Checks each argument vector starting with the first until a non-null value is found. |
| crun | Concatenate arguments and run them as a command. Shorthand for eval( parse( text = paste0( ... ) ) ). Consider also using base::get() which can be used to get an object from a string, but only if it already exists. |
| ddiff | Date difference function plus shorthand mdiff, qdiff, ydiff. |
| eq | Vectorized flexible equality comparison which considers NAs as a value. Returns TRUE if both values are NA, and FALSE when only one is NA. |
| gr | Get the golden ratio. |
| left | Behaves like Excel's left() and right() functions. |
| nanull | Facilitates checking for missing values. NULL values can cause errors on is.na checks, and is.na can cause warnings if it is inside if() and is passed multiple values. |
| %ni% | Not in. Opposite of %in% operator. Equivalent to x %ni% y is equivalent to ! x %in% y. |
| isval | Opposite of nanull. |
| read.txt | Read the text of a file into a character variable. |
| right | Behaves like Excel's left() and right() functions. |
| other shorthand (multiple) | functions to save you keystrokes : na (is.na), nan (is.nan), null (is.null), ischar (is.character), isdate (is.Date), isnum (is.numeric), tochar (as.character) |
| pad0 | Adds leading zeros to a character vector to make each value a specific length. For values shorter than length passed, leading zeros are removed. |
| spl | Extract a uniform random sample from a dataset or vector. |
| strx | base::str (structure) function but only for names matching a character value (regex). |
| w | write function. Writes to csv without row names and automatically adds .csv to the file name if it isn't there already. Changes to .csv if another extension is passed. |
Type Conversion
Helpful for setting or changing variable/vector data types.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| atype | Auto-type a dataframe: automatically determine data types and perform conversions per column. Used by read.any to automatically set types. |
| char2fac, fac2char | Convert all character columns to factors and vice-versa. |
| match.factors | Modifies two datasets so matching factor columns have the same levels. Typically this is used prior to joining or bind_rows in the easyr functions bindf, ijoinf, lfjoinf. |
| tobool | Flexible boolean conversion function. |
| todate | Flexible date conversion function using lubridate. Works with dates in many formats, without needing to know the format in advance. |
| tonum | Flexible number conversion for converting strings to numbers. Handles $ , ' and spaces. |
| xldate | Converts dates from Excel integers to something usable in R. |
| fmat | Format numbers and dates into character quickly and easily. |
Data Wrangling
Help with reading and manipulating data.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| binbyvol | Bins a numerical column according to another numerical column's volume. |
| bindf | dplyr's bind_rows doesn't work well when the data frame has factors. This function handles factors before applying bind rows. |
| dict | Get information about a Data Frame or Data Table. Use getinfo to explore a single column instead. |
| drows | Pull rows with a duplicated value. |
| getbetterint | Takes bucket names of binned values such as [1e3,2e3) or [0.1234567, 0.2) and formats the values nicely into values such as 1,000-2,000 or 0.12-0.20 |
| fldict | Data dictionary for all data in a folder. |
| getinfo | Get information about a Column in a Data Frame or Data Table. Use getdatadict to explore all columns in a dataset instead. |
| namesx | Get column names that match a pattern. |
| ijoinf | dplyr's joins doesn't work well when the data frame has factors. This function handles factors before applying dplyr::inner_join. Also availalbe are ljoinf, rjoinf for left and right join. |
| jrepl | Join and replace. Joins to another dataset and replaces matched values on a given column. Good for quickly grabbing values from another dataset to fill in or replace. |
| read.any | Flexible read function to handle many types of files, data types, etc. Reduces downstream errors from read issues. Currently handles CSV, TSV, DBF, RDS, XLS (incl. when formatted as HTML), and XLSX. |
| sch | Search a data frame or vector. Attempts to replicate Excel search but with regex. |
| short_dollars | Converts numeric plot axis dollars and attaches K and divides by 1000. |
| short_nums | Shortens axis numbering to thousands or millions and adds. |
| sumnum | Summarize all numeric columns in a dataset. |
| tcol | Transpose operation that sets column names equal to a column in the original data. |
Workflow
Operations to run projects and organize code.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| caching | functions including cache.init, cache.ok, save.cache, and clear.cache. |
| check_equal | Check actual versus expected values and get helpful metrics back. |
| hashfiles | Create a hash uniquely representing the state of files or folders. Helpful for checking for changes. |
| runfolder | Run scripts in a folder. If an error occurs, it will tell you what file had the error. Helpful for running ordered scripts. |
| tcmsg | Easy Try/Catch implementation to return the same message on error or warning. Makes it easier to write tryCatches. |
| tcwarn | Like tcmsg but returns a warning instead of an error when an error occurs, so code can continue to run. |
| validate.equal | Check that two data frames are equivalent. |
Data
These data resources are also included.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| nastrings | List of strings considered NA by easyr. Includes blank strings, "NA", excel errors, etc. |
| states | Helpul dataset of U.S. State abbreviations and names. |
| cblind | Charting colors optimized for and selected by colorblind individuals. |