websearchr

Overview

The purpose of websearchr is to provide a convenient way of accessing domains and searching popular websites directly from the R console. When working on small screens in particular, switching from the R console to the browser window, opening a new tab, navigating to the desired website and finally searching for the search terms requires around 3-6 clicks. As one is working mainly in the R console, it is more convenient to start typing the search terms right away, without having to go through the process mentioned above. For example, stackoverflow("my r problem") will open the Stackoverflow search for “my r problem” in a new browser tab automatically.

Currently supported websites:

Bing
Crossref
Duckduckgo
GitHub
Google
Google Scholar
Qwant
r-bloggers.com
Rdocumentation.org
rdrr.io
Reddit
Stackoverflow
Startpage
Twitter
Wikipedia
Wolfram Alpha

Any other domain can be accessed with web("example.com"). You can also simply open the search engine in the browser by not specifying a search term, e.g. using duckduckgo().

Search last error or warning

You can easily search for the last produced error or warning using last_error() or last_warning() inside one of the search functions, e.g. startpage(last_error()).

Language support

Twitter and Wikipedia can be searched in different languages than English. For example, to search the French version of Wikipedia use wikipedia("Langage de programmation", "fr").

Browser

To use a browser other than the default on your computer use options(browser = "path to browser"). For example, on macOS options(browser = "/usr/bin/open -a '/Applications/Safari.app'") or Windows options(browser = "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe"). To check which browser is set as the default use getOption("browser").

Installation

You can install websearchr from CRAN with:

install.packages("websearchr")

Or install the development version from GitHub:

remotes::install_github("fschaffner/websearchr")

Please report issues or requests for additional functionality to https://github.com/fschaffner/websearchr/issues.

Example

library("websearchr")

# Try:

web("r-project.org")
#> Opening https://www.r-project.org in browser

google("my search terms")
#> Opening Google search for "my search terms" in browser

stackoverflow("my r problem")
#> Opening Stackoverflow search for "my r problem" in browser

fschaffner/websearchr