Statistics, R, Graphics and Fun

It sounds easy to admit that you’ve lost a war, whereas when you are in a war, everything just changes.

“The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”

George Orwell

This is my function for tidying up R code:

Actually it’s quite easy, though I didn’t know it before. When R was upgraded from 2.4.1 to 2.5.0, the function source() was also modified. In the past I used to make use of source(my_source_file, echo = TRUE, prompt = "") to “tidy up” my code because it’s not convenient for me to type every space between operators, what’s more, I have no fixed rules to break a line or make a proper indent. Thus I need a function to automatically “tidy up” my code.

After I’ve read the source code of the function source(), I quickly found that the most critical function is parse(), which can turn your code file into neat expressions, and the rest work is just to extract substrings.

tidy.source = function(file = choose.files()) {
   exprs = parse(file)
   for (i in 1:length(exprs)) {
       dep = paste(deparse(exprs[i]), collapse = "\n")
       dep = substring(dep, 12, nchar(dep) - 1)
       cat(dep, "\n")
   }
}