prompt-search-github.Rmd

# Search GitHub {#search}

## Basic resources

GitHub searching

  * <https://github.com/search/advanced>
  * <https://help.github.com/articles/searching-code/>
  * <https://help.github.com/articles/search-syntax/>
  
Read-only mirror of R source by Winston Chang:
 
  * <https://github.com/wch/r-source>

Read-only mirror of all packages on CRAN by Gábor Csárdi:

  * <https://github.com/cran>
  * <http://cran.github.io>
  * [METACRAN](http://www.r-pkg.org)

## Use case

What if a function in a package has no examples? Or is poorly exampled? Wouldn't it be nice to find functioning instances of it "in the wild"?

[Via Twitter](https://twitter.com/noamross/status/563422536633839617), Noam Ross taught me a clever way to do such searches on GitHub. Put this into the GitHub search box to see how packages on CRAN use the `llply()` function from `plyr`:

``` bash
"llply" user:cran language:R
```

Or just [click here](https://github.com/search?l=r&q=%22llply%22+user%3Acran+language%3AR&ref=searchresults&type=Code).

Another example that recently came up on r-package-devel:

How to see lots of examples of roxygen templates?

This search finds >1400 examples of roxygen templates in the wild:

<https://github.com/search?q=man-roxygen+in%3Apath&type=Code&ref=searchresults>