Miscellaneous R Functions and Aliases

Provides utility functions for, and drawing on, the 'data.table' package. The package also collates useful miscellaneous functions extending base R not available elsewhere. The name is a portmanteau of 'utils' and the author.

Miscellaneous R functions and aliases

My name is Hugh and this is a package of functions I often put in R/utils.s. Hence, hutils.

Scope

The package attempts to provide lightweight, fast, and stable functions for common operations.

By lightweight, I mean in terms of dependencies: we import package:data.table and package:fastmatch which do require compilation, but in C. Since so many operations handle data frames, data.table seemed worthwhile -- and besides its compile time is not too onerous. Otherwise, all dependencies do not require compilation. (I also try to minimize the cardinality of package imports, but it's mostly the compile time I'm focused on.)

By fast, I mean essentially as fast as possible without using compilation.

By stable, I mean that unit tests should not change unless the major version also changes. To make this completely transparent, tests include the version of their introduction and are guaranteed to not be modified (not even in the sense of adding extra, independent tests) while the major version is 1. Tests that do not include the version in their filename may be modified from version to version (though this will be avoided).

News

hutils 1.3.0

Bug fixes:
- weight2rows:
  - no longer reorders the columns in the result
  - no longer updates by reference the data frame to be a data.table, instead a copy is made
New functions:
- weighted_quantile, like quantile but for weighted data
- weighted_ntile, like dplyr::ntile but for weighted data
- mutate_ntile convenience function for adding new column with ntiles
- trim_common_affixes, and associated helpers longest_prefix and longest_suffix.
Enhancements:
- weight2rows gains a rows.out argument to specify the number of rows in the result.

hutils 1.2.0

New functions:
- RQ(p, yes, no) short for if (!requireNamespace("p", quietly = TRUE)) yes else no.
- isAttached for conveniently determining whether a namespace is attached
- ahull for locating rectangles in a plot, as for automatically locating a text box.
- Switch vectorized version of switch to avoid nested if_else's.
drop_grep is an alias for drop_colr.
Minor changes:
- if_else reports a clearer error message when length(condition) == 1.

hutils 1.1.1

Change of stable test:
- The only changes were so that the test proceeds when a required package is present. The tests would never have succeeded in cases where they now skip. Consequently the major version number has not been incremented.
Bug fix:
- find_pattern_in respects include.comments
Enhancement:
- find_pattern_in accepts argument which_lines to allow multiple lines per file, not just the first (the default).

hutils 1.1.0

New functions:
- auc: area under the curve given predicted and actual values.
- select_grep: select columns matching a pattern.
- dev_copy2a4: convenience function for copying to an A4 PDF.
Other minor changes:
- if_else should be slightly faster when the condition contains NAs. before: 3.6 ms now 1.5 ms (for 100,000 entries -- see vignette)
- drop_constant_cols first checks whether the first and second entries are identical before working out the number of unique values.

hutils 1.0.0

Stable release:
- All tests are now marked as major release.
New function %notchin% for a 'safer' alternative to %notin%.

hutils 0.10.0

New function implies, logical implies.
New function drop_constant_cols
New function print_transpose_data_table for glimpsing data tables by rows
New alias pow for exponentiation.
Bug fixes:
- Ensure drop_empty_cols retains non-empty columns when duplicate names are used.
- coalesce errors if there is ... wrongly contains factors.

hutils 0.9.0

Changed if_else to reflect dplyr's formals so it can be a drop-in replacement.
Fix error for multi-length missing value in if_else when length-one condition.
Add vignette
Minor performance improvements

hutils 0.8.0

Added a NEWS.md file to track changes to the package.
New functions
- %ein% %enotin% avoid misspellings in filters
- AND, NEITHER, NOR, OR, nor, neither logical aliases
- drop_colr drop columns matching pattern
- ngrep negate regular expression
- select_which similar to dplyr::select_if
- set_colsuborder change the order of some columns without affecting the order of others
- weight2rows convert a weighted data.table to an unweighted one by repeating rows by the weight
- coalesce and if_else: lightweight versions of dplyr:: equivalents
Bug fixes:
- set_cols_first|last now respects the order of the supplied columns
Enhancements:
- mutate_other now accepts a mass argument as another way to generate an 'Other' column.