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HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a protocol by which most of us interact with the web. When we do requests to a website in a browser on desktop or mobile, or get some data from a server in R, all of that is using HTTP. HTTP has a rich suite of status codes describing different HTTP conditions, ranging from Success to various client errors, to server errors. R has a few HTTP client libraries - crul, curl, httr, and RCurl - each of which is slightly different....
Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of extracting written or typed text from images such as photos and scanned documents into machine-encoded text. The new rOpenSci package tesseract brings one of the best open-source OCR engines to R. This enables researchers or journalists, for example, to search and analyze vast numbers of documents that are only available in printed form. People looking to extract text and metadata from pdf files in R should try our pdftools package....
You can find members of the rOpenSci team at various meetings and workshops around the world. Come say ‘hi’, learn about how our packages can enable your research, or about our onboarding process for contributing new packages, discuss software sustainability or tell us how we can help you do open and reproducible research.
...A new package crul is on CRAN. crul is another HTTP client for R, but is relatively simplified compared to httr, and is being built to link closely with webmockr and vcr. webmockr and vcr are packages ported from Ruby’s webmock and vcr, respectively. They both make mocking HTTP requests really easy. A major use case for mocking HTTP requests is for unit tests. Nearly all the packages I work on personally make HTTP requests in their test suites, so I wanted to make it really easy to mock HTTP requests....
A new package isdparser is on CRAN. isdparser was in part liberated from rnoaa, then improved. We’ll use isdparser in rnoaa soon. isdparser does not download files for you from NOAA’s ftp servers. The package focuses on parsing the files, which are variable length ASCII strings stored line by line, where each line has some mandatory data, and any amount of optional data. The data is great, and includes for example, wind speed and direction, temperature, cloud data, sea level pressure, and more....
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