Search for packages by a particular author

Not exactly by author but perhaps access by maintainer would also be useful?

http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_summary_by_maintainer.html#summary_by_maintainer

EDIT by Tyler Rinker

DWin's suggestion can be brought to fruition with these lines of code:

search.lib <- function(term, column = 1){    require(XML)    URL <- "http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_summary_by_maintainer.html#summary_by_maintainer"    dat <-readHTMLTable(doc=URL, which=1, header=T, as.is=FALSE)    names(dat) <- trimws(names(dat))    dat$Maintainer[dat$Maintainer == ""] <- NA    dat$Maintainer = zoo::na.locf(dat$Maintainer)    if (is.numeric(column)) {        dat[agrep(term, dat[, column]), 1:3]    } else {        dat[agrep(term, dat[, agrep(column, colnames(dat))]), 1:3]    }}search.lib("hadley")search.lib("bolker")search.lib("brewer", 2)

Crantastic can search by author. You can do quite a bit more with crantastic but the functionality you're looking for is already provided there.

Adapted from available.packages by publication date :

## restrict to first 100 packages (by alphabetical order)pkgs <- unname(available.packages()[, 1])[1:100]desc_urls <- paste(options("repos")$repos,"/web/packages/", pkgs,     "/DESCRIPTION", sep = "")desc <- lapply(desc_urls, function(x) read.dcf(url(x)))authors <- sapply(desc, function(x) x[, "Author"])

Since I'm a narcissist (and Hadley Wickham has no packages in the first 100 [this was true in 2012 but cannot possibly be true now, in 2018!]):

pkgs[grep("Bolker",authors)]# [1] "ape"

The main problem with this solution is that doing it for real (rather than just for the first 100 packages) means hitting CRAN 3000+ times for the package information ...

edit: a better solution, based on Jeroen Oom's solution in the same place:

recent.packages.rds <- function(){    mytemp <- tempfile()    download.file(paste0(options("repos")$repos,"/web/packages/packages.rds"),                  mytemp)    mydata <- as.data.frame(readRDS(mytemp), row.names=NA)    mydata$Published <- as.Date(mydata[["Published"]])    mydata}mydata <- recent.packages.rds()unname(as.character(mydata$Package[grep("Wickham",mydata$Author)]))# [1] "classifly"    "clusterfly"   "devtools"     "evaluate"     "fda"         # [6] "geozoo"       "ggmap"        "ggplot2"      "helpr"        "hints"       # [11] "HistData"     "hof"          "itertools"    "lubridate"    "meifly"      # [16] "memoise"      "munsell"      "mutatr"       "normwhn.test" "plotrix"     # [21] "plumbr"       "plyr"         "productplots" "profr"        "Rd2roxygen"  # [26] "reshape"      "reshape2"     "rggobi"       "roxygen"      "roxygen2"    # [31] "scales"       "sinartra"     "stringr"      "testthat"     "tourr"       # [36] "tourrGui"