What’s New in R: March 24, 2025
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring a deep dive into regular expressions, a guide to working with column names in R, and a clever solution for rotating plots. Let’s dive in!
Baby got backreferences
Danielle Navarro has written an excellent tutorial on backreferences in regular expressions, a powerful but often misunderstood feature. Through clear examples and step-by-step explanations, she demonstrates how backreferences can be used to match repeated patterns and perform complex string manipulations. The post includes practical examples that show how to apply these concepts in real-world data cleaning scenarios.
Which names that are also names of countries are most common?
Random question, interesting analysis. In this blog post, Simon Couch uses the {babynames} and {countrycodes} packages and a bit of tidyverse-style analysis to answer the question: Which names that are also names of countries are most common? Any guesses as to which names/countries top the list?
Rotate the damn plot
Plots with text that makes the reader turn their head aren’t great. In this blog post, Ilya Kashnitsky gives a simple solution: rotate the damn plot. He recreates a difficult-to-read plot before rotating it to make it easier to read. Not only that; he also improves the plot, turning it into a dot plot. Check it out!
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Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What’s New in R? Leave a comment below!
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