R Tips and Tricks – Utilities¶

Metadata¶

Methods are functions which are specifically written for particular class
Have a look at the sloop package, maintained by Hadley Wickham (that alone is a reason). Use the function s3_methods_generic to get a nice table with some relevant information:
Percent formatting In the code snippet above I used the scales package’s percent function, which spares the formatting annoyance.
Get your object’s size When I load a data, I often want to know how big is it. There is the basic object.size function but it’s ummm, ugly. Use the aptly named object_size function from the pryr package.
Memory management Use the gc function; gc stands for garbage collection. It frees up memory by, well, collecting garbage objects from your workspace and trashing them. I at least, need to do this often.
heta function I use the head and tail functions a lot, often as the first thing I do. Just eyeballing few lines helps to get a feel for the data. Default printing parameter for those function is 6 (lines) which is too much in my opinion.
heta \<- function(x, k= 3){ cat(“Head – “,”\n”, “~~~~~”, “\n”) print(head(x, k)) cat(“Tail – “,”\n”, “~~~~~”, “\n”) print(tail(x, k)) }
Sound the alarm If you stretch your model enough, you will have to wait until computation is done with. It is nice to get a sound notification for when you can continue working. A terrific way to do that is using the beepr package.