R Cheatsheet

The R commands that have made my life easier.

Written on September 25, 2018

Hassle-free data.frame copy and paste (into or from Microsoft Excel)

# copy
%>% write.table("clipboard-128", sep = "\t", row.names = FALSE)
# paste
read.table("clipboard-128", sep = "\t", header = TRUE)

Set working directory to where the source file is located

setwd(dirname(sys.frame(1)$ofile))

Instantly convert Windows-style path to R-compliant format

Copy the path from File Explorer and

path <- readClipboard()

Globally disable string as factors

options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

Note that this has become the default behaviour since R 4.0.0.

Save a copy of console output to file

sink("log.txt", split = TRUE)
# your original script here
sink()

Remove leading zeros in a character vector

remove_leading_zeros <- function(character_vector){
  character_vector %>% 
    as.character() %>%
    # extract character from the first non-zero element to the end
    # unless it's all 0s, in which case return the character unchanged
    substr(start = regexpr(pattern = "[^0]", text = .), stop = nchar(.))
}

Fix the “unable to move temporary installation” issue

trace(utils:::unpackPkgZip, edit = TRUE)

Replace Sys.sleep(0.5) with Sys.sleep(2.5) on line 142.