

The basic information about a package is provided in the DESCRIPTION file, where you can find out what the package does, who the author is, what version the documentation belongs to, the date, the type of license its use, and the package dependencies. Typically, a package will include code (not only R code!), documentation for the package and the functions inside, some tests to check everything works as it should, and data sets. A package is a suitable way to organize your own work and, if you want to, share it with others.

You’ll cover the following topics and 11 frequently asked user questions: If you are starting with R, this post will cover the basics of R packages and how to use them. For example, if you are usually working with data frames, probably you will have heard about dplyr or data.table, two of the most popular R packages.īut imagine that you'd like to do some natural language processing of Korean texts, extract weather data from the web, or even estimate actual evapotranspiration using land surface energy balance models, R packages got you covered! Recently, the official repository ( CRAN) reached 10,000 packages published, and many more are publicly available through the internet. They increase the power of R by improving existing base R functionalities, or by adding new ones.

R packages are collections of functions and data sets developed by the community.
