39 Search GitHub

39.1 Basic resources

GitHub searching

• https://github.com/search/advanced
• https://help.github.com/articles/searching-code/
• https://help.github.com/articles/search-syntax/

Read-only mirror of R source by Winston Chang:

• https://github.com/wch/r-source

Read-only mirror of all packages on CRAN by Gábor Csárdi:

• https://github.com/cran
• http://cran.github.io
• METACRAN

39.2 Use case

What if a function in a package has no examples? Or is poorly exampled? Wouldn’t it be nice to find functioning instances of it “in the wild”?

Via Twitter, Noam Ross taught me a clever way to do such searches on GitHub. Put this into the GitHub search box to see how packages on CRAN use the llply() function from plyr:

"llply" user:cran language:R

Or just click here.

Another example that recently came up on r-package-devel:

How to see lots of examples of roxygen templates?

This search finds >1400 examples of roxygen templates in the wild:

https://github.com/search?q=man-roxygen+in%3Apath&type=Code&ref=searchresults