sprawl strives at providing access to complex functionality using a simple syntax. To achieve this objective:

  • The number of function arguments should be kept as limited as possible. Required arguments should be limited to one or two, and defaults to allow the more common use of the function must be always provided for optional arguments. Consider that sprawl functions (besides helpers) are meant to address common “use cases”. Therefore, they are not expected to allow performing also seldom-used processing tasks. For example, reproj_rast, though based on gdalwarp uses only a limited number of the possible gdalwarp arguments - for more complex use cases, the user is referred to “wrapped” routine. Analogously, plot_rast is not meant to replace levelplot, but to provide easy access to some of its more useful functionality);

  • Functions should be spatial-class agnostic (e.g., a function requiring a “vector” as an input should accept sp, sf and vector file names as inputs). Automatic recasting to the specific class required by the function can be done at the beginning of the function using cast_vect or cast_rast);

  • Functions should be generally easily pipable using the %>% operator to allow building additional complex functions using pipes of simpler ones. For example, the code below uses sprawl functions to implements a pipe which masks and crops a raster file on a vector file, and then extract and summarizes values of the masked raster on features of a second vector

  • sprawl generally follows the tidyverse coding style guide, with the following small differences/integrations:

    • Function names should use a <verb_objecttype> or <verb_specification> syntax allowing to easily understand what they do (e.g., good: get_projstring, read_vect, crop_rast, dissolve_vect, get_rastinfo, bad: projection, rastinfo, resize);

    • Function arguments should have meaningful (though short) names, allowing to easily understand their meaning (e.g., good: out_extent, width, color, out_filename , bad: te, lwd, col, file);

    • Calls to imported functions should always use the package_name::function_name syntax to avoid shadowing issues;

    • When possible, documentation of function arguments should start with a description of the “type” of expected input (e.g., character, numeric(2), Raster, etc.). We suggest the use of the sinew package to easily create function documentation skeletons, and of devtools::document() to create the Rd files;

    • The 80 characters per line “rule” can be taken lightly, but really long lines should be avoided (i.e., above 100 characters) ;