utilities {utilitiesR}R Documentation

Utilities package in R.

Description

This contains a set of utilities I find myself using quite often within R. They tend to be functions a developer would use more than a standard user.

Details

Files

There are a number of functions to create file names, directories, etc. There is also an extension of file.choose.

Debugging

A number of functions for debugging: verbosePrint which is essentially a wrapper around cat; verbosePrintf which is basically sprintf except that it also prints its output; evaluate, being shorthand for eval(parse(text=...)), and so on;

Coordinates

This also contains a number of functions for converting between GPS and UTM. It is arguable whether they should be in here, but I use them often enough that they are.

The function UTM2GPS and its inverse GPS2UTM rely on either the PROJ executable being in the user's $PATH (ie uses a system call), or the rgdal package being installed.

The PROJ / system call method is in there because it is often easier to install this on linux ("proj-bin" in Ubuntu) than it is to install the rgdal package.

However, on Windows, the rgdal package is quite easy to install, and so that is the more common method of coordinate conversion on that platform.

Hence these functions are just wrappers around those.

Maths

Finally, there are a few maths functions in there for convenience: make2Drot simply makes a 2x2 rotation matrix (I can never remember the formula myself); euclidDist calculates the euclidian distance between successive rows/columns of a matrix (again just a syntactic suggar); sortPointsRectangle sorts the vertices of a rectangle into an anticlockwise fashion (TODO: extend to sort vertices of any convex polygon).


[Package utilitiesR version 1.8.4 Index]