choices

The goal of this package is to provide user friendly interactive choices. Ideally, this package would be used by users with little to no coding experience. Thus, some efforts were devoted to ensure users can’t break the menus easily (e.g., by entering options that are not available or adding spaces). Effort was also devoted to cross-platform compatibility.

Installation

This package is yet to be released on CRAN. In the future, you will be able to install the released version of choices from CRAN with:

install.packages("choices")

For now, install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("matiasandina/choices")

Usage

Choose directory

There are several packages that handle directory selection. The goal of this function is to handle directory selection, using existing packages, across platforms. Functionality was tested in Windows, macOS, and Linux environments. It attempts to select the method on the background, by checking/suggesting what packages are available, without making hard assumptions of what the user needs.

The function arguments allow for a bit more customization.

initial_dir defaults to getwd()
method allows user to define the method of their fancy for the user interface.

library(choices)

choose_directory()
choose_directory(initial_dir = "your_path_here")
choose_directory(method = "rChoiceDialogs")
choose_directory(method = "rstudioapi")

Choose files

A similar approach was done for choosing files. User might need to adjust the method if they want to select multiple files, given some GUIs do not allow for multiple file selection.

choose_files()

Numeric menu

We can have a numeric menu as shown below:

library(choices)
opts <- c("Apple", "Banana", "Coconut")
numeric_menu(opts = opts)

numeric_menu(opts = opts, prompt = "A different prompt here")

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Please see your options below:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Option 1) Apple
Option 2) Banana
Option 3) Coconut

A different prompt here :>

This menu is robust to cats slamming the keyboard:

numeric_menu(opts = opts)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Please see your options below:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Option 1) Apple
Option 2) Banana
Option 3) Coconut
Use numbers to select the option :> aksdasdakjdsa
Your input is not valid, please enter a number.
Use numbers to select the option :>

This menu is robust to selecting options that are not on the menu:

numeric_menu(opts = opts)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Please see your options below:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Option 1) Apple
Option 2) Banana
Option 3) Coconut
Use numbers to select the option :> 4
Option is not valid. Choose again
Use numbers to select the option :>

Ask yes/no

This function was included to make a more robust version of utils::askYesNo() that could not be broken so easily by a cat slamming the keyboard.

ask_yes_no("Do you like ice-cream?")

Do you like ice-cream? [Y/N]? :> askdjakdja
Option is not valid. Choose again
Do you like ice-cream? [Y/N]? :>

Contribute

This is a preliminary release. Please file issues to make this software work better.