websearchr

The goal of websearchr is to provide a convenient way of accessing domains and searching popular websites directly from the R console. When working on small screens in particular, switching from the R console to the browser window, opening a new tab, navigating to the desired website and finally searching for the search terms requires around 3-6 clicks. As one is working mainly in the R console, it is more convenient to start typing the search terms right away, without having to go through the process mentioned above. For example, stackoverflow("my r problem") will open the stackoverflow search for "my r problem" in a new browser tab automatically.

Currently supported websites:

• Bing
• Crossref
• Duckduckgo
• GitHub
• Google
• Google Scholar
• Rdocumentation.org
• rdrr.io
• Stackoverflow
• Twitter
• Wikipedia

Any other website can be accessed with open(my-website.com).

Bonus: obtain the number of Google hits for a combination of search terms with google.hits("search terms").

To use a browser other than the default on your computer use options(browser = "path to browser"). For example, on Mac OS X options(browser = "/usr/bin/open -a '/Applications/Safari.app'") or Windows options(browser = "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe"). To check which browser is set as the default use getOption("browser").

Installation

You can install websearchr from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("fschaff/websearchr")

Please report issues or requests for additional functionality to https://github.com/fschaff/websearchr/issues

Example

library(websearchr)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'websearchr'
#> The following object is masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     open

## Try:
open(r-project.org)
#> Opening https://www.r-project.org in browser
google("my search terms")
#> Opening Google search for "my search terms" in browser.
stackoverflow("my r problem")
#> Opening Stackoverflow search for "my r problem" in browser.