[R] Creating bibtex file of all installed packages?

[Achim Zeileis]

On Fri, 11 Dec 2009, Rainer M Krug wrote:

> Hi
>
> is there an easy and fast way, to generate a BibTeX file of all installed /
> loaded packages and R?
>
> I know about toBibtex(citation()) to extract the BibTeX for a single
> package, but how can I generate a file containg citations for all installed
> / loaded packages?

I don't think that there is a way other than calling citation() for each 
of the installed.packages(). You could do something like this:

## try to get BibTeX for each of the installed packages
b <- lapply(installed.packages()[,1], function(x)
   try(toBibtex(citation(x))))
## omit failed citation calls
b <- b[-which(sapply(b, class) == "try-error")]
## unify to list of Bibtex
b <- lapply(b, function(x) if(inherits(x, "Bibtex")) list(x) else x)
## list of unique entries
b <- unique(do.call("c", b))
## write everything to a single .bib file
writeLines(do.call("c", lapply(b, as.character)), "Rpackages.bib")

hth,
Z

> Cheers,
>
> Rainer
>
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