This week version 2.0 of the V8 package has been released to CRAN. Go get it now! install.packages("V8") The V8 package provides an embedded JavaScript engine that can be used inside of R. You can use it interactively as a JavaScript console, but it is mostly useful for wrapping JavaScript libraries in R packages. Some cool examples include jsonld, jsonvalidate, and daff.

A bit more than one year ago, rOpenSci launched its new website design, by the designer Maru Lango. Not only did the website appearance change (for the better!), but the underlying framework too. ropensci.org is powered by Hugo, like blogdown!

We’ve just released a new version of rnoaa with A LOT of changes. Check outthe release notesfor a complete list of changes.

Last week Google and friends released the new major version of their OCR system: Tesseract 4. This release builds upon 2+ years of hard work and has completely overhauled the internal OCR engine. From the tesseract wiki: We have now also updated the R package tesseract to ship with the new Tesseract 4 on MacOS and Windows. It uses the new engine by default, and the results are extremely impressive!

Proper identification of individuals is crucial for acknowledging andstudying their scientific work, be it journal articles or pieces ofsoftware. In this tech note, one year after CRAN started supportingORCIDs, we shall explain why and how to use unique author identifiers inDESCRIPTION files. Why use ORCIDs on CRAN? When analyzing the authorship of CRAN packages, one can look at authors’names and email addresses.

You might have read my blog post analyzing the social weather ofrOpenScionboarding,based on a text analysis of GitHub issues. I extracted text out ofMarkdown-formatted threads with regular expressions. I basicallyhammered away at the issues using tools I was familiar with until itworked! Now I know there’s a much better and cleaner way, that I’llpresent in this note. Read on if you want to extract insights abouttext, code, links, etc.

rgbif was seven years old yesterday! What is rgbif? rgbif gives you access to data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) via their API. A samping of use cases covered in rgbif: Search for datasets Get metrics on usage of datasets Get metadata about organizations providing data to GBIF Search taxonomic names Get quick taxonomic name suggestions Search occurrences by taxonomic name/country/collector/etc.

This week version 2.0 of the mongolite package has been released to CRAN. Major new features in this release include support for MongoDB 4.0, GridFS, running database commands, and connection pooling. Mongolite is primarily an easy-to-use client to get data in and out of MongoDB. However it supports increasingly many advanced features like aggregation, indexing, map-reduce, streaming, encryption, and enterprise authentication.

The gifski package which was demonstrated in May at eRum 2018 in Budapest is now on CRAN. Gifski is a simple but powerful package which can hopefully take away an important performance bottleneck for generating animated graphics in R. What is Gifski Gifski is a multi-threaded high-quality GIF encoder written in Rust. It can create animated GIF images with thousands of colors per frame and do so much faster than other software.

Have you ever needed to connect to a remote server over SSH to transfer files via SCP or to setup a secure tunnel, and wished you could do so from R itself? The new rOpenSci ssh package provides a native ssh client in R allows you to do that and even more, like running a command or script on the host while streaming stdout and stderr directly to the client. The package is based on libssh, a powerful C library implementing the SSH protocol.