Peter Meissner (@marvin_dpr) released crossword.r? to CRAN today. It’s a spiffy package that makes it dead simple to generate crossword puzzles.

He also made a super spiffy javascript library to pair with it, which can turn crossword model output into an interactive puzzle.

I thought I’d combine those two creations with a way to highlight new/updated packages from the previous week, cool/useful packages in general, and some R functions that might come in handy. Think of it as a weekly way to get some R information while having a bit of fun!

This was a quick, rough creation and I’ll be changing the styles a bit for next Friday’s release, but Peter’s package is so easy to use that I have absolutely no excuse to not keep this a regular feature of the blog.

I’ll release a static, ggplot2 solution to each puzzle the following Monday(s). If you solve it before then, tweet a screen shot of your solution with the tag #rstats #puzzler and I’ll pick the first time-stamped one to highlight the following week.

I’ll also get a GitHub setup for suggestions/contributions to this effort + to hold the puzzle data.

ANSWERS

library(crossword.r)

cw <- Crossword$new(rows = 12, columns = 12)

cw$add_words(
  
  words = c(
    "crosswordr",
    "searchr",
    "kerasformula",
    "fs",
    "crypto",
    "mgcv",
    "startsWith",
    "akima",
    "rcompgen",
    "broom",
    "nord"
  ),
  
  clues = c(
    "New package to generate crosswords (w/o '.')",
    "Interpolation-focused package",
    "Core generalized additive modelling package",
    "Package facilitating searching Bing, Google and more from an R console",
    "New, high-level interface package to 'keras'",
    "Consistent, cross-platform, vectorised filesystem operations package",
    "Interface package to all digital/crypto currency market data",
    "base function to test if a string starts with another string",
    "utils function to generation command completion networks",
    "Package that makes it easy to tidy statistical analyses objects",
    "An arctic, north-bluish color palette package"#,
  )
  
)