[R-pkgs] formatR: farewell to ugly R code

[Yihui Xie]

This is an announcement of the release of an R package 'formatR',
which can help us format our R code to make it more human-readable. If
you have ugly (I mean unformatted) R code like this:

 # rotation of the word "Animation"
# in a loop; change the angle and color
# step by step
for (i in 1:360) {
     # redraw the plot again and again
plot(1,ann=FALSE,type="n",axes=FALSE)
# rotate; use rainbow() colors
text(1,1,"Animation",srt=i,col=rainbow(360)[i],cex=7*i/360)
# pause for a while
Sys.sleep(0.01)}

There are no spaces, no appropriate indent... The package 'formatR'
provides a GUI (by gWidgets) to make messy R code clean and tidy, e.g.

# rotation of the word 'Animation'
# in a loop; change the angle and color
# step by step
for (i in 1:360) {
   # redraw the plot again and again
   plot(1, ann = FALSE, type = "n", axes = FALSE)
   # rotate; use rainbow() colors
   text(1, 1, "Animation", srt = i, col = rainbow(360)[i],
       cex = 7 * i/360)
   # pause for a while
   Sys.sleep(0.01)
}

The usage is simple:

# formatR depends on RGtk+; will be installed automatically
# better use the latest version of R (>=2.10.1)
install.packages('formatR')
library(formatR)
# or formatR()

Screen-shots can be found here:
http://yihui.name/en/2010/04/formatr-farewell-to-ugly-r-code/

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-6609 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
3211 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA