Little useless-useful R functions – R Lorem Ipsum

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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry and extensively popularized in the past 60 years.

It’s main purpose it more than obvious, in addition the fact is that a reader is not distracted by readable content and is focusing on layout, outlook or design of a page (or specimen).

Idea is to have a Lorem Ipsum text for R community, randomly generated from all the functions available in base package. You might be thinking that users might get distracted by reading the content, but randomly selected names of the functions is as much readable as Lorem Ipsum text itself. But there is a twist. You might actually spot a function that you never heard of, when merely glancing over the text or when copy and pasting it in your design.

The code is consist of two steps. First one grabs all functions from base package:

function_list <- function(){
  lw <- builtins() #(internal = FALSE)
  lw2 <- help(package="base") 
  lw3 <- ls("package:base")
  lwA <- c(lw,lw2,lw3)
  lwA <- unique(lwA)
  lwA <- trimws(gsub("[[:punct:]]", " ", lwA))
  #ltrim / rtrim
  return(lwA)
  }

And the second part generates the length of the text based on the limitations of length and approximation.

RLoremIpsum <- function(text_length, approx=TRUE){
  lw <- function_list()
  LorIps <- ''
  while (nchar(LorIps) < text_length) {
    lw <- gsub("^ *|(?<= ) | *$", "", lw, perl = TRUE)
    new_w <-  sample(lw,1, replace=TRUE)
    LorIps <- paste(LorIps, new_w, sep = " ")
    if (approx==FALSE){
    LorIps <- substr(LorIps, 1, text_length)
    }
  }
 
  last_word <- tail(strsplit(LorIps ,split=" ")[[1]],1)
     if ((nchar(last_word) == 1) == TRUE) {
    LorIps <- substr(LorIps, 1, nchar(LorIps)-1) # replace last char with blank space
    }
   return(LorIps)
}

And simply generating the text:

# generated Lorem Ipsum with 1000 characters
RLoremIpsum(10000, approx=TRUE)

There is your random text filler. But this time, forget the Latin, hello R

As always, code is available on Github.

Happy R-coding

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