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rdocdump: Dump ‘R’ Package Documentation and Vignettes into One File

DOI

Dump source code, documentation and vignettes of R packages into a single file. Supports installed packages, tar.gz archives, and package source directories. If the package is not installed, only its source is automatically downloaded from CRAN for processing. The output is a single plain text file or a ‘character’, which is useful to ingest complete package documentation into a large language model (‘LLM’) or pass it further to other tools, such as {ragnar} to create a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow.

Installation

You can install the development version of rdocdump from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("e-kotov/rdocdump")

Example

Extract documenation of rJavaEnv package by downloading source from CRAN and save it to file rJavaEnv_docs.txt

rdd_to_txt(
  pkg = "rJavaEnv",
  file = "rJavaEnv_docs.txt",
  force_fetch = TRUE, # force download even if package is installed
  keep_files = "none" # delete temp files
)

Citation

To cite package ‘rdocdump’ in publications use:

Kotov E (2025). rdocdump: Dump R Package Documentation and Vignettes into One File. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.rdocdump https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.rdocdump, https://github.com/e-kotov/rdocdump.

BibTeX:

@Manual{rdocdump,
  title = {rdocdump: Dump R Package Documentation and Vignettes into One File},
  author = {Egor Kotov},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://github.com/e-kotov/rdocdump},
  doi = {10.32614/CRAN.package.rdocdump},
}