Using the 'available.packages' Function to Retrieve Emails

Question

I am attempting to retrieve email addresses of contributing package authors and maintainers to the R-Project. The function reads as follows:

availpkgs <- available.packages(contriburl = contrib.url(getOption("repos"), type),
    method, fields = NULL, type = getOption("pkgType"),
    filters = NULL)

I've attempted different character values in the fields parameter to retrieve Maintainer and Author info from the 'PACKAGES' files, but have not been had luck. Does anyone know how I might approach this? Thank you in advance for your time.

I have to ask - why are you harvesting email addresses of R people? For good and not evil, I hope? — Ken Williams, Jan 12 '10 at 18:54
This is useful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11560865/list-and-description-of-all-packages-in-cran-from-within-r/11561793#11561793 — Ben Bolker, Jan 23 '13 at 20:31

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 11 '10 at 18:46

I do not think the Author information is in what available.packages() retrieves:

R> AP <- available.packages()
R> colnames(AP)
 [1] "Package"    "Version"    "Priority"  
 [4] "Bundle"     "Contains"   "Depends"   
 [7] "Imports"    "LinkingTo"  "Suggests"  
[10] "Enhances"   "OS_type"    "License"   
[13] "File"       "Repository"
R>

So maybe you need to combine this with a per-package lookup of the DESCRIPTION info at CRAN (or a mirror). I do that, and a few more things, in the 200-line script driving the CRANberries RSS feed / html summary of package updates at CRAN which stores stateful info in SQLite. For this, I retrieve Author, Maintainer etc directly from the package I am currently looking at rather than in one big global scoop. That said, there may of course be other meta-data at CRAN for this...

Using the 'available.packages' Function to Retrieve Emails

1 Answers1