[R] R web site-Useability & finding varous bits of documentation

[Charles C. Berry]

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008, Charles C. Berry wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Jun 2008, John Kane wrote:
>
>>  I was starting to write a note to a prospective R-user and came to the
>>  point of explaining how to get useful introductory information on R.
>>
>>  After mentioning the Into and the FAQs I went on to try to explain how to
>>  use a lot of the contributed information.
>>
>>  However I realised that there seems to be no direct way to get to Other
>>  Publications or Contributed Documenation.
>>
>>  The best I have seen is to get to Books and then click on  "other
>>  publications" which take one to "Publications related to R" or go to
>>  "other" (main page)  and then click on "Contributed Documentation"
>>  which takes one to "Contributed Documentation"  This seems less than
>>  optimal.
>>
>>  Am I missing some more direct ways to get to "Publications related to R"
>>  and "Contributed Documentation"?  I remember blundering around the site
>>  for some time (days in elapsed time?) before I managed to find these
>>  documents.
>
> Look at the page source for
>
> 	http://www.r-project.org/navbar.html
>
> or
>
> 	http://cran.r-project.org/navbar.html
>
> and you will see the href URLs.
>
> Or if you use Firefox, right click on the link, select 'copy link location', 
> and paste the result into your explanation or paste it into your location 
> window and then bookmark it.

Better still, use an R-centric solution:

> cran.url <- "http://cran.r-project.org/"
> cran.navbar <- readLines( url( paste( cran.url, "navbar.html" , sep="" ) ) )
> contrib.link <- sub(".*href=\"([^\"]+)\".*", "\\1", grep("Contributed",cran.navbar,value=TRUE) )
> contrib.url <- paste( cran.url, contrib.link , sep="" )
> contrib.url
[1] "http://cran.us.r-project.org/other-docs.html"
> contrib.source <- readLines( url( contrib.url ) )

and so on.

:-)

Chuck

>
> HTH,
>
> Chuck
>
>
>
>
>>
>>  If I am  not we may be losing a lot of potential users who just cannot
>>  find basic documentation.  The Intro and the FAQs are invaluable but not
>>  exactly the best way for a complete noivice to get started.
>>
>>  ______________________________________________
>>  R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>>  https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>  PLEASE do read the posting guide
>>  http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>  and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>> 
>
> Charles C. Berry                            (858) 534-2098
>                                            Dept of Family/Preventive 
> Medicine
> E mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu	            UC San Diego
> http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

Charles C. Berry                            (858) 534-2098
                                             Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
E mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu	            UC San Diego
http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901