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Workflow while using the errorist package

James Joseph Balamuta

2023-12-25

Source: vignettes/working-with-errorist.Rmd
working-with-errorist.Rmd

Overview

The errorist package is designed to provide support for newcomers to R who are learning how to write code. Philosophically, errorist takes the position of being as invisible as possible. To achieve the invisibility, on package load, handlers to receive error and warning message are automatically created and applied. These handlers propogate the messages raised by R into the searcher package, which automatically searches the contents on Google by default.

Usage

To use errorist in a causal manner, please type:

library(errorist)
#> Warnings and errors will automatically trigger a web search.

To remove the errorist handlers, please either call the disable_errorist() function or detach the package.

detach("package:errorist", unload = TRUE)
#> Warnings and errors are no longer automatically searched.

During development, many issues can arise. With errorist enabled, each error is automatically searched. For instance, if we typed a function that wasn’t defined, we’d get:

f()
#> Error in f() : could not find function "f"
#> Searching query in a web browser ...

Outside of errors, the second most common issue is receiving warnings. Warnings only indicate a recoverable issue has occurred during a function run. As a result, there can be many warnings that build up during an estimation routine. If errorist is enabled, each unique warning will automatically be searched within its own tab in the browser. As an example, consider the following function:

many_warnings = function() {
  warning("First warning")
  warning("Second warning")
  warning("Random warning")
  warning("Random warning")
}

When run, the many_warnings() function will issue exactly four warnings. However, only three of these warnings are unique. Thus, there will be exactly three searches performed after the function finishes its execution. As a result, the output will be like:

#> Warning messages:
#> 1: In many_warnings() : First warning
#> 2: In many_warnings() : Second warning
#> 3: In many_warnings() : Random warning
#> Searching query in a web browser ... 
#> Searching query in a web browser ... 
#> Searching query in a web browser ...