ghing / r-data-cheatsheet

Notebooks that describe tasks that I use when working with data for journalism in R but don't do often enough to remember off the top of my head.

R data cheatsheet

These are notebooks that describe tasks that I use when working with data for journalism in R but don't do often enough to remember off the top of my head.

These are mostly recipes for things that took me a bit of time to Google or for which I didn't know the right language.

Fundamentals

• Everything is a vector

Inspecting data

Listing data variables and types

Use str:

str(mydata)

Source: Quick-R: Viewing Data

Finding data

• Search census variables

Importing data

• Copying data from the system clipboard

Selecting and filtering data

• Get dataframe value from a vector of variable names

Transforming data

• Group by part of a date variable
• Conditional aggregates on groups. This is sort of like a "count if".
• Convert coordinates in a CSV to spatial data

Testing

• Run testthat tests in a single fileat e

RStudio

I do most of my work with R using RStudio. These are some helpful tips I've learned about working in that environment.

Vim keybindings

You can change the keyboard shortcuts in RStudio to mimic that of the vim editor (and a few other editors).

Source: Customizing RStudio.

Other resources

• How Do I? …: Sharon Machlis has made a searchable table of tasks in R to accompany her book Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism.
• RStudio Cheat Sheets: RStudio has a number of PDF cheatsheets about a wide range of topics and libraries including visualization using ggplot2 and data transformation using dplyr.