Templated output in R

Earo Wang, who is the curator for the We are R-Ladies twitter feed this week (last week of April, 2019), had a really nice tweet about using the whisker package to create a template incorporating text and data in R. Her example created a list of tidyverse packages with descriptions.

I really liked the example, but thought that the glue package might be able to do the same thing. I used Earo’s code to generate a tibble with the package names and descriptions, and glue_data to create the templated list.

library(tidyverse)
library(glue)
tidy_pkgs <- 
  tibble('pkgs' = c('ggplot2','purrr','readr','tidyr',
                    'dplyr','forcats','lubridate','stringr')) %>% 
  mutate(descr = map_chr(pkgs, ~packageDescription(., fields='Description')))

glue_data(tidy_pkgs, 
          "- [**{pkgs}**](http://{pkgs}.tidyverse.org): {descr}")

• ggplot2: A system for ‘declaratively’ creating graphics, based on “The Grammar of Graphics”. You provide the data, tell ‘ggplot2’ how to map variables to aesthetics, what graphical primitives to use, and it takes care of the details.
• purrr: A complete and consistent functional programming toolkit for R.
• readr: The goal of ‘readr’ is to provide a fast and friendly way to read rectangular data (like ‘csv’, ‘tsv’, and ‘fwf’). It is designed to flexibly parse many types of data found in the wild, while still cleanly failing when data unexpectedly changes.
• tidyr: An evolution of ‘reshape2’. It’s designed specifically for data tidying (not general reshaping or aggregating) and works well with ‘dplyr’ data pipelines.
• dplyr: A fast, consistent tool for working with data frame like objects, both in memory and out of memory.
• forcats: Helpers for reordering factor levels (including moving specified levels to front, ordering by first appearance, reversing, and randomly shuffling), and tools for modifying factor levels (including collapsing rare levels into other, ‘anonymising’, and manually ‘recoding’).
• lubridate: Functions to work with date-times and time-spans: fast and user friendly parsing of date-time data, extraction and updating of components of a date-time (years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds), algebraic manipulation on date-time and time-span objects. The ‘lubridate’ package has a consistent and memorable syntax that makes working with dates easy and fun. Parts of the ‘CCTZ’ source code, released under the Apache 2.0 License, are included in this package. See https://github.com/google/cctz for more details.
• stringr: A consistent, simple and easy to use set of wrappers around the fantastic ‘stringi’ package. All function and argument names (and positions) are consistent, all functions deal with “NA”’s and zero length vectors in the same way, and the output from one function is easy to feed into the input of another.