httr 0.4

httr 0.4 is now available on CRAN. The httr packages makes it easy to talk to web APIs from R.

The most important new features are two new vignettes to help you get started and to help you make wrappers for web APIs . Other important improvements include:

New headers() and cookies() functions to extract headers and cookies from responses. status_code() returns HTTP status codes.
POST() (and PUT(), and PATCH()) now have an encode argument that determine how the body is encoded. Valid values are “multipart”, “form” or “json”, and the multipart argument is now deprecated.
GET(..., progress()) will display a progress bar, useful if you’re doing large uploads or downloads.
verbose() gives you considerably more control over degree of verbosity, and defaults have been selected to be more helpful for the most common cases.
NULL query parameters are now dropped automatically.

There are number of other minor improvements and bug fixes, as described by the release notes .

Recreating Septa Transit Timetables in Python

Recently, Rich and I were poking around transit data, and we were struck by the amount of structuring that goes into transit timetables. For example, consider this weekend rail schedule table from SEPTA, Philadelphia’s transit agency. Notice these big pieces: The vertical text on the left indicating trains are traveling “TO CENTER CITY”. The blue header, and spanner columns (“Services” and “Train Number”) grouping related columns. The striped background for easier reading. Also the black background indicating stations in Center City (the urban core). Tables like this often have to be created in tools like Illustrator, and updated by hand. At the same time, when agencies automate table creation, they often sacrifice a lot of the assistive features and helpful affordances of the table.

Mar 5

Outgrowing your laptop with R and Positron

R-Ladies Abuja has posted a recording of a recent talk on Positron, and you can find it here!

Quarto icon, PDF file icon, accessibility icon, and validation shield

Mar 5

PDF Accessibility and Standards

Quarto 1.9 brings PDF accessibility and standards support, building on new tagging features in LaTeX and Typst.

httr 0.4

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Recreating Septa Transit Timetables in Python

Outgrowing your laptop with R and Positron

PDF Accessibility and Standards

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