Updating R

There are plenty of blogs on the best ways to update R so I'm not going to repeat those. However, moving of packages is never that straightforward especially when I need to transition between computers. The set of code below was great for me as a way to quickly install all the packages I use, as long as you do a bit of prep work.

This first bit stores your current list of packages inside a csv file.


The last part was helpful for installing into RStudio. As you open RStudio, you end up loading certain packages automatically and therefore get issues when you try to install them. This code gets the difference between what is already loaded or installed and your list you downloaded prior to installing.

Package of the Month: mailR

Have you ever been stuck watching or just waiting for your code to finish? This post will outline a simple example program that you can use to email a file or message. I've found this incredibly helpful on time critical projects where I want to maximize my time by coding up the next problem while the current one executes. The mailR package allows you to programmatically attach files and email results to yourself. Assuming your company SMTP server is open for you to use, the mailR package can support you in doing this. My example below emails the R script used to create the email to myself. I'm hoping that I can send an example of a rmarkdown file as the body of the email in my next example using this package.