Fast and Versatile Argument Checks

Tests and assertions to perform frequent argument checks. A substantial part of the package was written in C to minimize any worries about execution time overhead.

Fast and versatile argument checks for R.

Ever used an R function that produced a not-very-helpful error message, just to discover after minutes of debugging that you simply passed a wrong argument?

Blaming the laziness of the package author for not doing such standard checks (in a dynamically typed language such as R) is at least partially unfair, as R makes theses types of checks cumbersome and annoying. Well, that's how it was in the past.

Enter checkmate.

Virtually every standard type of user error when passing arguments into function can be caught with a simple, readable line which produces an informative error message in case. A substantial part of the package was written in C to minimize any worries about execution time overhead. Furthermore, the package provides over 30 expectations to extend the popular testthat package for unit tests.

Installation

For the stable release, just install the latest version from CRAN:

install.packages("checkmate")

For the development version, use devtools:

devtools::install_github("mllg/checkmate")

Resources

News

Version 1.8.2 (2016-xx-xx)

*Matrix and *Array now additionally allow to check for integerish storage type via argument "mode".
Functions *Count, *Int, *Number, *Integer, *Integerish and *Numeric do not accept logical values any more.
checkAtomicVector is now more restrictive and prohibits a dimension symbol. Thus, a matrix is not considered an atomic vector any more.
Dropped support for AssertCollections in convert functions (asInt, asInteger and asCount).
Added checkTibble.

Version 1.8.1 (2016-06-27)

Function test_file is longer exported.
*Function does not longer lookup functions with match.fun. As a result, passing functions via the string of the function name stopped working.
In qassert using f as first char in a rule now specifies factor (before: function).

Version 1.8.0 (2016-06-06)

Most functions now support the handling of default arguments encoded as NULL via argument null.ok.
Functions *File and *Directory are deprecated due to name clashes and will be removed in a future version. Please use *FileExists or *DirectoryExists instead.
New helper function matchArg to provide a simple an easy way for partial argument matching in combination with an AssertCollection.
Added alias functions for all check functions (check_*) to provide support for the underscore programming style in assert().

Version 1.7.4 (2016-04-08)

Compatibility with the upcoming testthat version.
expect_ functions now return the checked object invisibly.
Changed default of argument .var.name for assertions and label for expectations: They now default to the return value of the exported function vname (instead of missing which confuses some linters).
Fixed error message in convert functions: Variable name was not properly looked up by the heuristic.
Fixed a bug in qassertr and qtestr where the error message was not properly generated if multiple rules were provided.
New argument depth for qtestr to control the recursion depth while checking nested lists.

Version 1.7.3 (2016-03-10)

Added checkDate().
Argument .var.name of assert functions now has \code{NULL} as default value (instead of missing).
Fixed a bug in *OS functions.
Fixed a bug in *Directory functions.
New argument extension for the *File family of functions.

Version 1.7.2 (2016-02-25)

Added checkOS().
Argument fixed for *Character functions now accepts a string instead of a boolean value and thus can directly be used for a substring search.
New arguments min.chars, pattern, fixed and ignore.case for the *String family of functions.
Exported helper functions wf (which.first) and wl (which.last).
Now importing the new backports package for functions lengths() and dir.exists.

Version 1.7.1 (2016-02-02)

Fixed a segfault while checking an upper bound in qassert/qtest.
Some minor speedups

Version 1.7.0 (2016-01-23)

Added alias functions for all functions to support the underscore style, e.g. assert_numeric is the new alias for assertNumeric and test_matrix is the alias for test_matrix.
All assert functions now invisibly return the tested object instead of TRUE and thus can be used with magrittr pipes.
Improved speed for most functions by reducing the .Call overhead (Thanks to Hadley Wickham).
Added *DataTable functions to properly test primary and secondary keys of data tables.
Removed *Percentage family of functions.
Exported functions makeAssertion, makeTest and makeExpectation to assist expanding the package with user-generated checks.
Added functions makeAssertionFunction, makeTestFunction and makeExpectationFunction to automatically create the respective functions based on a provided check function.

Version 1.6.3 (2015-10-23)

Assertions can now be collected (via makeAssertCollection()) and reported (via reportAssertions()).
qassert() can now perform bound checks on strings.
The default for the parameter "ordered" of the *SetEqual functions is now set to FALSE, as described in the documentation.

Version 1.6.2 (2015-07-26)

Fixed a compile-time warning.
checkmate does not import testthat anymore in order to speed up package loading times and to keep the dependencies at a minimum. The expect_* family of functions can still be used, the namespace will be loaded on demand.

Version 1.6.1 (2015-07-16)

New family of functions: expect_* is intended to be used in combination with testthat. But note that functions expect_null() and expect_named() are not provided to avoid name clashes with testthat.
Added qexpect() and qexpectr().
Added argument all.missing for checks of matricies and data frames.
Added anyNaN().
Clarified documentation for assert() and allMissing().
Fixed a bug where bound checks were performed on missing values.
Fixed a bug where missingness was not correctly detected in data frames.

Version 1.6.0 (2015-06-19)

Started to support long vectors.
Added a short vignette.
Improved documentation.
New argument "combine" for assert() to allow combining check functions with an AND instead of an OR.

Version 1.5.3 (2015-05-13)

Fixed a bug regarding the number of rows in zero-column data frames.
Fixed a bug where the type of lists with dimension attribute where reported as "array" or "matrix".
Family *Array: new arguments "min.d" and "max.d".
Family *Array and *Matrix: Argument "mode" now additionally accepts strings "list" and "atomic".

Version 1.5.2 (2015-03-19)

Fixed: (assert|check|test)Character(NA_character_, min.chars = 1) does not eval to TRUE anymore.
New arguments for *Factor functions: (n|min|max).levels.
Improved error messages for type and length checks.
Improved error messages for missing arguments.

Version 1.5.1 (2014-12-13)

Included a workaround for R's nrow and ncol to properly work with data frames.
Fixed a bug handling complex number in checks for integerish values.
Improved documentation.

Version 1.5.0 (2014-10-18)

Added checkNames().
Added checkPercentage().
Added anyInfinite().
Fixed error messages for some dimension checks.
Fixed an error while checking numerics for finiteness.

Version 1.4 (2014-09-03)

Fixed a bug where rownames and colnames of data.frames where not retrieved correctly.
Fixed a bug in checkVector() (wrong order of arguments in call to C).
Filesystem access: checks for write and executable rights are now disabled on windows.