Great R packages for data import, wrangling & visualization by Sharon Machlis.
From the post:
One of the great things about R is the thousands of packages users have written to solve specific problems in various disciplines — analyzing everything from weather or financial data to the human genome — not to mention analyzing computer security-breach data.
Some tasks are common to almost all users, though, regardless of subject area: data import, data wrangling and data visualization. The table below show my favorite go-to packages for one of these three tasks (plus a few miscellaneous ones tossed in). The package names in the table are clickable if you want more information. To find out more about a package once you’ve installed it, type
help(package = "packagename")in your R console (of course substituting the actual package name ).
…
Forty-seven (47) “favorites” sounds a bit on the high side but some people have more than one “favorite” ice cream, or obsession. 
You know how I feel about sort-order and I could not detect an obvious one in Sharon’s listing.
So, I extracted the package links/name plus the short description into a new table:
| car | data wrangling |
| choroplethr | mapping |
| data.table | data wrangling, data analysis |
| devtools | package development, package installation |
| downloader | data acquisition |
| dplyr | data wrangling, data analysis |
| DT | data display |
| dygraphs | data visualization |
| editR | data display |
| fitbitScraper | misc |
| foreach | data wrangling |
| ggplot2 | data visualization |
| gmodels | data wrangling, data analysis |
| googlesheets | data import, data export |
| googleVis | data visualization |
| installr | misc |
| jsonlite | data import, data wrangling |
| knitr | data display |
| leaflet | mapping |
| listviewer | data display, data wrangling |
| lubridate | data wrangling |
| metricsgraphics | data visualization |
| openxlsx | misc |
| plotly | data visualization |
| plotly | data visualization |
| plyr | data wrangling |
| psych | data analysis |
| quantmod | data import, data visualization, data analysis |
| rcdimple | data visualization |
| RColorBrewer | data visualization |
| readr | data import |
| readxl | data import |
| reshape2 | data wrangling |
| rga | Web analytics |
| rio | data import, data export |
| RMySQL | data import |
| roxygen2 | package development |
| RSiteCatalyst | Web analytics |
| rvest | data import, web scraping |
| scales | data wrangling |
| shiny | data visualization |
| sqldf | data wrangling, data analysis |
| stringr | data wrangling |
| tidyr | data wrangling |
| tmap | mapping |
| XML | data import, data wrangling |
| zoo | data wrangling, data analysis |
Enjoy!
I want to use XQuery at least once a day in 2016 on my blog. To keep myself honest, I will be posting any XQuery I use.
To sort and extract two of the columns from Mary’s table, I copied the table to a separate file and ran this XQuery:
- xquery version “1.0”;
- <html>
- <table>{
- for $row in doc(“/home/patrick/working/favorite-R-packages.xml”)/table/tr
- order by lower-case(string($row/td[1]/a))
- return <tr>{$row/td[1]} {$row/td[2]}</tr>
- }</table>
- </html>
One of the nifty aspects of XQuery is that you can sort, as on line 5, in all lower-case on the first <td> element, while returning the same element as written in the original table. Which gives better (IMHO) sort order than UPPERCASE followed by lowercase.
This same technique should make you the master of any simple tables you encounter on the web.
PS: You should always acknowledge the source of your data and the original author.
I first saw Sharon’s list in a tweet by Christophe Lalanne.
[…] heavy carousing during the holidays, you may still remember Great R packages for data import, wrangling & visualization [+ XQuery] , where I re-sorted the table by Sharon Machlis , to present the R packages in package name […]
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