Hidden R gems: package datapasta

datapasta is about reducing resistance associated with copying and pasting data to and from R. It is a response to the realisation that I often found myself using intermediate programs like Sublime to munge text into suitable formats. Addins and functions in datapasta support a wide variety of input and output situations, so it (probably) “just works”. Hopefully tools in this package will remove such intermediate steps and associated frustrations from our data slinging workflows.

At the moment this package contains these RStudio addins that paste data to the cursor:

tribble_paste which pastes a table as a nicely formatted call to tibble::tribble() Recommend Ctrl + Shift + t as shortcut. Table can be delimited with tab, comma, pipe or semicolon.

vector_paste which will paste delimited data as a vector definition, e.g. c(“a”, “b”) etc. Recommend Ctrl + Alt + Shift + v as shortcut.

vector_paste_vertical which will paste delimited data as a vertically formatted vector definition. Recommend Ctrl + Shift + v as shortcut

example output: c(“Mint”, “Fedora”, “Debian”, “Ubuntu”, “OpenSUSE”)

df_paste which pastes a table on the clipboard as a standard data.frame definition rather than a tribble call. This has certain advantages in the context of reproducible examples and educational posts. Many thanks to Jonathan Carroll for getting this rolling and coding the bulk of the feature. Recommend Ctrl + Alt + Shift + d as shortcut. dt_paste which is the same as df_paste, but for data.table.