XML

Last week after my useR! talk, someone I had met at the R-Ladies dinner asked me for a list of all the links in my slides. I said I’d prepare it, not because I’m a nice person, but because I knew it’d be an use case where the great tinkr package would shine! 😈 What is tinkr? tinkr is an R package I created, and that its current maintainer Zhian Kamvar took much further that I’d ever would have.

Once again a post praising XML. 😇 These are notes from a quite particular use case: what if you want to replace the usage of a function with another one in many scripts, without manual edits and without touching lines that do not contain a call to replace? The real life example that inspired this post is the replacement of all calls to expect_that(..., equals(...)), like expect_that(a, equals(1)), in igraph tests with expect_equal().

I found an excuse to blog about XML again! Yes, RSS feeds are in practice XML, but for most people, that’s not why they are cool. An RSS (really simple syndication) feed is metadata about all, or the most recent posts published by a website: publication date, content or summary, etc. Much handier in my opinion to use that to get updates among Twitter “noise”. RSS feed example Have a look at the RSS feed for this blog over at https://masalmon.

One of my favorite tool is XPath, the query language for exploring XML and HTML trees. In this post, I will highlight a few use cases of this “angle-bracket crunching tool” and hope to convince you that it’s an awesome thing to know about and play with. Many thanks to Christophe Dervieux for useful feedback on this post! Mille mercis ! Brief intro to XPath in R Say I have some XML,