NEWS in package ‘xfun’

---

Changes in version 0.49

• Added an argument use_block = FALSE to protect_math(). When use_block = TRUE, a $$ $$ expression that spans across multiple lines will be protected in a code block.

• protect_math() will ignore $ $ if there are backticks after the opening $ or before the closing $, e.g., $`this is not math`$.

• protect_math() allows for parentheses () around math expressions now, e.g., ($x$) was previously not recognized but is recognized now (thanks, @AlbertLei, yihui/litedown#34).

• record() works with quote() now (thanks, @ben-schwen, yihui/litedown#38).

• html_escape() will not escape double quotes (i.e., convert "" to ") by default, and the conversion will be done only for html_escape(attr = TRUE).

• The arguments before and after of read_all() can take functions of two arguments now, with the second argument being the content of each file.

• Added an argument start to make_fence().

Changes in version 0.48

• Added utilities for HTML tags: html_tag(), html_escape(), html_escape(), and html_view(). Removed the soft dependency on the htmltools package accordingly.

• base_pkgs() is faster now: it calls tools::standard_package_names() if the function exists (R >= 4.4.0), otherwise it just returns a constant vector of base package names (thanks, @arnaudgallou, #91).

• Added a function mime_type() to obtain the MIME types of files via mime::guess_type() if mime is installed, otherwise it will call tools:::mime_type(), and fall back to using a system command (e.g., file --mime-type) to obtain the types.

• Added a function file_rename() to deal with file.rename() failures by calling file.copy() (thanks, @Giqles @katrinabrock, rstudio/bookdown#804).

• new_app() will use utils::browseURL() to open the app if options('viewer') is not configured (thanks, @AlbertLei, yihui/litedown#29).

• Added a method record_print.record_asis() to return the object as is.

Changes in version 0.47

• Added functions lazy_save() and lazy_load() to save objects to files and lazy-load them.

• Fixed a bug in record(dev = svglite::svglite) that misplaced plots when low-level plot functions are used (thanks, @liao961120, yihui/litedown#17).

• Specified the lowest R version required (v3.2.0) for this package.

Changes in version 0.46

• md_table() should add a vertical ellipsis to row names when rows are truncated by the limit argument.

• session_info() recognizes Positron now (thanks, @chuxinyuan, #89).

Changes in version 0.45

• For record() with verbose = 1 or 2, invisible NULL is no longer printed.

• Rscript_call() will show the actual error message (if an error occurred) during calling the function in a new R session.

Changes in version 0.44

• Added a function cache_exec() to cache the execution of an expression either in memory or on disk. It is much more general and flexible than cache_rds(). For example, it supports custom reading/writing methods for cache files, and can load locally created variables in the expression while loading cache.

• Added an argument cache to record() to make it possible to enable caching.

• Added arguments message and warning to record() to decide whether messages and warnings should be recorded.

• Changed the default value of the argument error of record() from FALSE to NA. Now FALSE means to suppress error messages, and NA means to throw errors normally. This is for consistency with the message and warning arguments.

• Added an S3 generic function record_print(), which is similar to knitr::knit_print() but for the purpose of printing visible values in record().

• The record() function gained new arguments print and print.args to support custom printing functions and arguments.

• Added a function md_table(), which is a minimal Markdown table generator.

• Exported the internal function md5() to calculate the MD5 checksums of R objects. The function is essentially a workaround for tools::md5sum() (see HenrikBengtsson/Wishlist-for-R#21).

• For fenced_block(), a space is added between the backticks and the language name, e.g., ```r has become ``` r now. This will affect snapshot tests based on Markdown (an example).

• Added a shorthand fenced_div() for fenced_block(char = ':').

• write_utf8() returns the con argument (typically a file path) now. Previously, it returns NULL.

• Added an experimental function new_app() to create a local web application.

• The returned value of yaml_body() contains a new element lines in the list indicating the line numbers of YAML metadata if exists.

• Removed the skip argument from split_source().

• For split_source(line_number = TRUE), the attribute name for line numbers in the returned value was changed from line_start (a single starting line number) to lines (both the starting and ending numbers).

• Fixed an edge case in prose_index(), in which inline code was incorrectly recognized as a code block fence.

Changes in version 0.43

• Added a function upload_imgur(), which was adapted from knitr::imgur_upload(). The latter will call the former in the future. xfun::upload_imgur() allows users to choose whether to use the system command curl or the R package curl to upload the image. It also has a new argument include_xml to specify whether the XML response needs to be included in the returned value.

• Added a function fenced_block() to create a fenced block in Markdown (thanks, @cderv, yihui/knitr#2331). The block can be either a code block or a fenced Div.

• Fixed a bug in xfun::record() when the argument verbose = 1 or 2.

Changes in version 0.42

• isFALSE() has been fully deprecated for R >= 3.5.0, and will be completely removed from this package in the future (https://yihui.org/en/2023/02/xfun-isfalse/).

• Added a function record() to run R code and record the results, which is similar to evaluate::evaluate() but less sophisticated and technically simpler. One major difference is that xfun::record() records plots directly to files instead of saving them as display lists.

• yaml_load() gained an envir argument, which can be used to specify the environment to evaluate R expressions in YAML (i.e., expressions written after !expr or !r). This is not straightforward in the upstream yaml package (thanks, @viking, vubiostat/r-yaml#54).

• yaml_body() gained the ... argument to pass more arguments to yaml_load().

• split_source() gained a merge_comments argument to merge consecutive lines of comments into the next code block, a line_number argument to store the line number of each expression in the returned value, and a skip argument to skip the rest of the code when the skip token is found.

• check_old_package() has been vectorized, i.e., the arguments name and version can take vectors now.

• Factored out the code for parsing chunk options and dividing a chunk into chunk options and chunk body from knitr to this package as functions csv_options() and divide_chunk(), respectively. They will be used by knitr and other packages in future.

• Added a function decimal_dot() to evaluate an expression after forcing options(OutDec = '.') and Sys.setlocale(LC_NUMERIC = 'C') (for rstudio/rmarkdown#2525).

Changes in version 0.41

• process_file() will write to the file only if the processed text is different with the input text. This is to avoid writing files unnecessarily.

• session_info() will remove extra blank lines (thanks, @chuxinyuan, #82) and also omit the time zone info.

Changes in version 0.40

• number_to_words() supports decimal numbers now (thanks, @harshvardhaniimi, #80).

• is_ascii() is more robust now (thanks, @bastistician, #81).

Changes in version 0.39

• Fixed a bug that protect_math() fails to protect the starting $$ that has leading white spaces.

• Added a function strip_html() to remove HTML tags and comments from text.

• The function alnum_id() will remove HTML tags and comments from text (using strip_html()) before converting it to an ID string.

• Added a function env_option() to retrieve an option value from options(). If the option does not exist there, check the environment variables. This provides a way for users to set an option via either options() or an environment variable.

Changes in version 0.38

• Added an object download_cache, which is a list of methods to download a URL, cache the result, retrieve the result from the cache, and clear the cache.

• Added an argument default to url_filename() to provide a default filename when it cannot be determined from the URL.

• Added a function yaml_load() to read YAML data when the yaml package is not available. It only supports a limited number of data types and is supposed to be used as a fallback method. See the help page ?xfun::yaml_load for details.

• Added a function yaml_body() to split a document into YAML metadata and the body.

• is_arm64() also supports Linux now (thanks, @eitsupi, #74).

• is_blank() returns a logical vector of the same length as the input vector now, indicating if each element of the input is blank. Previously it returns a logical scalar indicating whether all elements are blank. If you want the old behavior, you can use all(is_blank()).

Changes in version 0.37

• Added a function is_arm64() to test the CPU type (thanks, @AlbanSagouis, #72).

• Started deprecating xfun::isFALSE() in favor of base::isFALSE() for R >= 3.5.0 (thanks, @mmaechler, #66); isFALSE() will eventually be removed from xfun when we do not need to support R < 3.5.0.

Changes in version 0.36

• Added a new argument resolve_symlink to normalize_path() to get the absolute paths of symlinks without resolving them (with resolve_symlink = FALSE).

Changes in version 0.35

• Added a new argument token to protect_math() to optionally include a token around math expressions.

• base64_uri() relies less on the mime package now. For some common file extensions (e.g., .jpg/.png), this function knows their MIME types.

• stringsAsStrings() has been removed from this package.

Changes in version 0.34

• Added a new function alnum_id() to generate ID strings from a character vector.

• The function stringsAsStrings() has been deprecated.

Changes in version 0.33

• Reverted the change for #68: the characters -+!_# are no longer accepted by default in filename extensions, since they are relatively rare and caused a breakage in rstudio/bookdown#1369. If you wish to allow for these characters, you may use the new extra argument in file_ext() and related functions, e.g., xfun::file_ext(x, extra = '-+!_#').

• The function stringsAsStrings() will be deprecated in a future release of xfun, because the global option stringsAsFactors = FALSE has become the default in base R since 4.0.0.

Changes in version 0.32

• Added a function shrink_images() to shrink images to a maximum width using the magick package (thanks, @apreshill, rstudio/blogdown#614).

• Added a function tinify_dir() as a wrapper of tinify() to compress images under a directory.

• file_ext() supports more file extensions now, such as .c++, .FB2K-COMPONENT, and so on (thanks, @tentacles-from-outer-space, #68).

• Fixed the issue that xfun::base_pkgs() could hang R (thanks, @mmaechler, #66).

• The ... argument in dir_create() was not passed to dir.create().

Changes in version 0.31

• github_releases(use_jsonlite = FALSE) supports R versions below 4.1.0 now.

• session_info() silently drops empty package names now (thanks, @phargarten2, #65).

Changes in version 0.30

• Added a new function is_blank() (previously existed in knitr) to test if all elements of a character vector are blank (white spaces or empty strings).

• Added a new argument error = TRUE to existing_files().

Changes in version 0.29

• github_releases() can fetch all releases (tags) of a Github repo now.

• Added an argument .error to download_file() so that users can customize the error message when the download fails.

• Added functions rest_api_raw() and rest_api() to get data from a REST API; also added the function github_api() to get data from the Github API based on rest_api_raw().

• Added a wrapper function system3() based on system2() to mark the character output of system2() as UTF-8 if appropriate.

• Added a function existing_files() to return file paths that exist (a shorthand of x[file.exists(x)]).

• Added a function read_all() to read multiple files and concatenate the content into a character vector.

• url_accessible() uses curlGetHeaders() by default (instead of download_file()) to test if a URL is accessible when the curl package is not available.

• When options(xfun.rev_check.compare = FALSE), rev_check() will run R CMD check on reverse dependencies against a source package but not the CRAN version of this package. By default, this option is TRUE, meaning that R CMD check will run against both versions of the package.

Changes in version 0.28

• Added a new function url_accessible() to test if a URL can be downloaded.

• Added a new function try_error() to try an expression and see if it throws an error.

Changes in version 0.27

• Exported and documented the function xfun::base_pkgs() (to return base R package names).

• Changed the default value of the status_only argument of compare_Rcheck() from FALSE to TRUE.

• Added new functions crandalf_check() and crandalf_results() for checking (especially large numbers of) reverse dependencies of packages via crandalf.

• Added new functions append_utf8() and append_unique() based on read_utf8() and write_utf8() to append content to files or connections.

Changes in version 0.26

• The windows_only argument of native_encode() has been removed. Now native_encode() only tries the conversion to native encoding on platforms where l10n_info()[['UTF-8']] does not return TRUE.

• Added a solaris argument to upload_win_builder().

Changes in version 0.25

• Fixed a bug in broken_packages() (thanks, @PythonCoderUnicorn, rstudio/rmarkdown#1990).

• Added a files argument to optipng() so that users can specify the list of PNG files instead of running optipng on a whole directory.

Changes in version 0.24

• Exported the internal function broken_packages() to reinstall broken R packages.

• Fixed the bug in proj_root() #54 (thanks, @clarkliming).

Changes in version 0.23

NEW FEATURES

• Added a tinify() function to compress PNG/JPEG images via the Tinify API.

• Added a news2md() function to convert package news to the Markdown format. This is mainly for converting the plain-text NEWS file and the NEWS.Rd file to NEWS.md.

• Added a format_bytes() function to format numbers of bytes using a specified unit, e.g., 1024 can be formatted as 1 Kb.

• When using pkg_load2() in an renv project, it will use renv::install() to install missing packages by default to take advantage of renv's caching feature (thanks, @chunyunma @cderv, #52).

• upload_win_builder() no longer requires the system command curl to be available; if curl is not available, the R package curl will be used instead, which means this R package must be installed. In addition to uploading to the ftp server of win-builder, it's also possible to upload to https://win-builder.r-project.org/upload.aspx: call upload_win_builder(..., server = 'https'). This change was made so that it would be possible to continue to upload to win-builder in case it should stop supporting ftp (CRAN has discouraged package authors from using ftp://).

BUG FIXES

• Backticks are added to math environments by mistake when \begin{} and \end{} do not match (thanks, @oliviergimenez, #51).

MINOR CHANGES

• The argument src was renamed to pkg in install_dir().

• The argument file of upload_win_builder() defaults to pkg_build() now, i.e., by default, it will build a source package and upload it, so you do not need to build the package separately.

Changes in version 0.22

NEW FEATURES

• relative_path() is vectorized now.

• Added a new function retry() to retry calling a function for a number of times in case of errors.

• Added a new function sort_file(), which is a shorthand for process_file(fun = sort) to sort the lines in a text file.

MAJOR CHANGES

• The argument FUN was renamed to fun in process_file().

MINOR CHANGES

• Inside download_file(), the timeout option in options() is set to 3600 seconds when it takes the default value of 60 seconds, which may not be enough for downloading large files (thanks, @matthewgson, yihui/tinytex#286).

Changes in version 0.21

NEW FEATURES

• Added a new function pkg_available() to test if a package with a minimal version is available (thanks, @cderv, #45).

• Added a new function set_envvar() to set environment variables and return their old values, so they could be restored later.

• Added a new function exit_call() to call a function when a parent function exits.

• Exported the internal function read_bin().

• Added an argument verbose to bg_process().

• Rscript_call() gains an options argument to pass command-line options to Rscript (thanks, @cderv, #48).

Changes in version 0.20

NEW FEATURES

• Added a function msg_cat() to generate a message with cat(). See the help page ?xfun::msg_cat for more information.

• Added a function mark_dirs() to mark directories with a trailing slash in a vector of paths to differentiate them from normal filenames (#44).

BUG FIXES

• xfun::proc_kill() failed to work on *nix.

• xfun::del_empty_dir() failed to delete empty dirs.

• xfun::file_string() preserves emptiness (thanks, @MichaelChirico, #38).

• xfun::raw_string() preserves the class(es) of the input now (thanks, @MichaelChirico, #40).

MINOR CHANGES

• Exported the function dir_create().

Changes in version 0.19

NEW FEATURES

• Added functions bg_process() to run a command in a background process, and proc_kill() to kill a process.

• Added a function del_empty_dir() to delete a directory if it is empty.

• Added functions is_abs_path() and is_rel_path() to check if paths are absolute or relative.

• Added a function is_sub_path() to test if a path is under a directory.

• Added a function is_web_path() to test if a path is a web path that starts with http:// or https:// or ftp:// or ftps://.

• Documented and exported the previously internal functions dir_exists() and file_exists() (thanks, @cderv, #36).

• Added a function dir_create() to create a directory recursively by default when it does not exist.

• Added an argument fail to Rscript_call() to allow users to customize the error message when an error occurred in calling the function in a new R session.

MINOR CHANGES

• file_ext(), sans_ext(), and with_ext() no longer use tools::file_ext() or tools::file_path_sans_ext(), but provide a slightly different implementation. They treat tar.(gz|bz2|xz) and nb.html as file extensions, and also allow extensions to contain a trailing ~ or #.

Changes in version 0.18

NEW FEATURES

• Added a function grep_sub() to perform replacement with gsub() on elements matched from grep().

• Added a function github_releases() to obtain the tags from the Github releases of a repo.

• Added a function bump_version() to increase the last digit of version numbers by one.

• Moved a function process_file() from the blogdown package to this package, and documented it.

• Added a function valid_syntax() to check if an R code fragment is syntactically valid. This function was moved from the highr package.

• Added a function url_filename() to extract filenames from URLs. This function is used by download_file() to determine the default output filename.

• Added a function do_once() to perform a task once in an R session.

• Added a function proj_root() to find the root directory of a project. Currently it only supports R package projects and RStudio projects by default.

• Added a function relative_path() to calculate the relative path of a path relative to a directory.

• Added a function from_root(), which is similar to here::here() but returns a relative path instead of an absolute path.

• Added a function magic_path() that, given an incomplete input path, tries to find the actual path recursively under subdirectories of a root directory. For example, users may only provide a base filename, and magic_path() will look for this file under subdirectories and return the actual path if it is found.

MINOR CHANGES

• Now download_file() tries the download method winnet first (previously it was libcurl) on Windows (thanks, @cderv, #33).

Changes in version 0.17

NEW FEATURES

• Supports xfun::pkg_attach(packages, install = "pak"), i.e., use pak::pkg_install() to install a package when it is not installed (thanks, @GitHunter0, #32).

• Added a new function xfun::split_source() to split lines of R source code into minimal complete expressions. This function was moved from the highr package.

Changes in version 0.16

• Added a new function base64_decode() to decode data from the base64 encoding (thanks, @wush978, #31).

Changes in version 0.15

NEW FEATURES

• Added a new function tree(), which is based on str() in base R, but changes the output of str() into a tree diagram to make it easier to understand nested data structures.

• Added a new function base64_encode() to encode data into the base64 encoding (thanks, @wush978, #27).

• Added a new function base64_uri() to generate the Data URI (or Data URL) for a file.

BUG FIXES

• Fenced code blocks commented out in <!-- --> are not longer recognized as code blocks but prose (thanks, @jarauh, #25).

Changes in version 0.14

NEW FEATURES

• The cache_rds() function can invalidate the cache automatically when the code passed to its expr argument has changed. Two new arguments, hash and clean were added to this function to make it more useful and powerful. See the help page ?xfun::cache_rds() for more information.

Changes in version 0.13

NEW FEATURES

• Added a new function cache_rds() to cache an R expression to a *.rds file.

• Added a new function Rscript_call() to call a function (with arguments) in a new R session via the command Rscript.

• The recheck argument of rev_check() can take a vector of package names, and only these packages will be checked. See ?xfun::rev_check for more details.

Changes in version 0.12

NEW FEATURES

• Added a new function split_lines().

Changes in version 0.11

BUG FIXES

• read_utf8() will read the file with options(encoding = 'native.enc') and ignore user's setting such as options(encoding = 'UTF-8') (#21).

Changes in version 0.10

NEW FEATURES

• Added the function as_strict_list() to convert an existing object to a strict list without wrapping it in another list if the object already is of type list (in contrast to how strict_list() behaves) (thanks, @salim-b, #20).

Changes in version 0.9

NEW FEATURES

• Added a function rename_seq() to rename files to add an incremental numeric prefix to the filenames, e.g., rename a.txt, b.txt, c.txt to 1-a.txt, 2-b.txt, 3-c.txt.

Changes in version 0.8

MINOR CHANGES

• xfun::write_utf8(NULL) is equivalent to xfun::write_utf8(character(0)) now (thanks, @schloerke, yihui/knitr#1714).

Changes in version 0.7

MINOR CHANGES

• loadable() is quiet with R 3.6.0 (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2019-May/077774.html).

Changes in version 0.6

NEW FEATURES

• Added the ... argument to same_path() to pass additional arguments to normalize_path().

BUG FIXES

• The warn argument in prose_index() failed to suppress warnings.

Changes in version 0.5

NEW FEATURES

• Added functions upload_ftp() and upload_win_builder() to upload files to FTP servers.

• Added a function stringsAsStrings() (see its help page for details).

• Added an argument warn to prose_index() to suppress the warning when code fences are not balanced.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed the bug that prose_index() recognizes double backticks as code fences (thanks, @shrektan, #14 #15).

Changes in version 0.4

NEW FEATURES

• Added functions embed_file(), embed_dir(), and embed_files() to embed files in an HTML output file (e.g., from R Markdown), so that the files can be directly downloaded from the web browser. One use case is to call one of these functions in an R code chunk of an Rmd document to embed the Rmd source document or data files in the HTML output, so readers can download them.

• Added a new argument message to pkg_attach(), so you can suppress package startup messages via xfun::pkg_attach(..., message = FALSE) or set the global option options(xfun.pkg_attach.message = FALSE) (thanks, @wch, yihui/knitr#1583).

MINOR CHANGES

• The argument rw_error was moved from gsub_dir() to gsub_file() (gsub_dir(rw_error = ...) will still work).

• is_ascii() now returns NA for NA_character_ (thanks, @shrektan, #8 #9).

Changes in version 0.3

NEW FEATURES

• Added a new functions download_file() to try various methods to download a file.

• Added a new function is_ascii() to test if a character vector only consists of ASCII characters.

• Added a new function numbers_to_words() to convert numbers to English words (thanks, @daijiang, #3).

Changes in version 0.2

NEW FEATURES

• Added a new_session argument to loadable().

• Added new functions gsub_file(), gsub_files(), gsub_dir(), and gsub_ext() to replace strings in files.

• Added new functions Rscript and Rcmd as wrappers of system2('Rscript') and system2('R', 'CMD'), respectively.

• Added a new function install_dir() to install a source package from a directory.

• Added a new function file_string() to read a text file (encoded in UTF-8) and return its content a single character string (lines concatenated by \n).

• Added a new function raw_string() to print a character vector in its "raw" form using cat(..., sep = '\n') instead of print(), because the latter may introduce [1], "extra" double quotes, and escape sequences, which are not very human-readable.

• Added a new function session_info() as an alternative to sessionInfo().

• Added a new function rev_check() to run R CMD check on the reverse dependencies of a package, and a corresponding helper function compare_Rcheck() for showing the differences in logs with the CRAN version and the current version of the package, respectively.

• Added new functions for dealing with Markdown text: prose_index() returns the line indices of text that is prose (not code blocks), and protect_math() protects math expressions in Markdown in backticks.

• Added an error argument to read_utf8() to signal an error if the file is not encoded in UTF-8.

Changes in version 0.1

NEW FEATURES

• attr() as an abbreviation of base::attr(exact = TRUE).

• file_ext(), sans_ext(), and with_ext() to manipulate extensions in filenames.

• in_dir() to evaluate an R expression in a directory.

• isFALSE() as an abbreviation of identical(x, FALSE).

• is_windows(), is_macos(), is_linux(), and is_unix() to test operating systems.

• native_encode() to try to encode a character vector in the native encoding.

• normalize_path() as an abbreviation of normalizePath(winslash = '/', mustWork = FALSE).

• optipng() to run the command optipng to optimize all PNG files under a directory.

• parse_only() parses R code without keeping the source references.

• pkg_attach() and pkg_load() to attach and load a vector of packages, respectively (and optionally, install the missing packages).

• read_utf8() and write_utf8() to read and write UTF-8 files, respectively.

• same_path() to test if two paths are the same.

• strict_list() is a version of list() that disables partial matching of the $ operator.

• tojson() is a simple JSON serializer.

• try_silent() is an abbreviation of try(silent = TRUE).