A firefox extension for R Site Search

Motivation

The R Site Search by Jonathan Baron has been extensively used ever since it was created. It allows to search in a growing collection of R packages from CRAN, BioConductor and other repositories (see here for a list of packages). The website uses namazu as a search engine, which is nice and fast.

There are already several ways to make the query on the R Site Search website, one can use the website itself, use firefox searchplugins as described in this R wiki page, or even use the R function RSiteSearch introduced in R version 2.1.0 (correct me if I'm wrong). The downside of this approach is that one has to go back and forth all the time in the results.

The firefox extension rsitesearch enables to search R documentation pages included in Jonathan Baron's server from a firefox sidebar. The search is done quietly with the help of javascript and the results are returned as a tree package/functions matching the user's request.

How to use it

Once the extension is installed, restart firefox. You should see a small R icon on the left of the status bar, waiting for you to click it. Appears a tree with the list of the packages listed in R Site Search. You can browse around, there is a leaf for each documentation file with a small icon summarizing what this is about. From here, there are two ways to use it.

• R Site Search (the default). Enter a query, the extension will pass it on to the namazu engine on R Site Search and build a new tree of the relevant documentation for you. Using the Options... menu, you can specify how many results you want back from namazu.
• Package filter. This one filters the name of the packages with a regular expression entered. For example :
  • packages that contains gra (regex : gra)
  • ... whose names start with gra (regex : ^gra)
  • ... containing twice the same letter next to each other (regex : ([\w])\1)
  • ... with short names (regex : ^[\w]{2,5}$)
  • ... with a number in it (regex : [\d])
  • ...
• Wiki Search: The search engine can also search inside the R wiki

How to get involved in this

• Languages Issues : The rsitesearch extension speaks french, romanian and english. If you want your language to be supported, you might want to contact us for guidance. It is not a much difficult task (thanks to the mozilla mechansism for that) and will be appreciated.
• The keyword images could be improved. If you feel like you want to do that, prepare a png file of dimension 16px times 16px named for example cluster.png (if the keyword is cluster).
• Comments, feature requests, feedback are always welcome.

References

• R
• R Site Search
• XUL Planet : A library of XUL information, tutorials and downloads.

Creator

Technical Support

Licence

Mozilla Public Licence version 1.1 or greater

Contributors

• Adrian Dusa kindly translated rsitesearch into romanian (locale : ro)

Screenshots

Main view. One can see the sidebar with the tree of all packages and the R button in the status bar

Searching for density estimation with the R site search engine

Neat integration with Firefox with a button on the status bar
Filtering the package names with the regex ^gr (packages starting with the gr). The extension is aware of the vignettes included in a package.