The goal 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 Scholar
- Qwant
- r-bloggers.com
- Rdocumentation.org
- rdrr.io
- Stackoverflow
- Wikipedia
Any other domain can be accessed with web(my-website.com).
To use a browser other than the default on your computer use options(browser = "path to browser"). For example, on Mac OS X 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").
You can install websearchr from CRAN with:
install.packages("websearchr")Or install the development version from GitHub:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("fschaff/websearchr")Please report issues or requests for additional functionality to https://github.com/fschaff/websearchr/issues.
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