pukRhelpers: A Personal Toolbox of R Helpers – Pukar Bhandari

Author

Pukar Bhandari

Published

May 23, 2025

pukRhelpers is where the small functions I kept copying between projects ended up. It is a personal toolbox, not a polished library, and I only update it when my own work needs something. The package has continuous checks and test coverage set up, and documentation at ar-puuk.github.io/pukRhelpers.

1 Install

pak::pak("ar-puuk/pukRhelpers")
install.packages("pukRhelpers", repos = "https://ar-puuk.r-universe.dev")

1: Straight from GitHub. remotes::install_github() and devtools::install_github() work too.
2: Or from my personal R-universe.

2 What is in it

Function	What it does
`load_esri()`	Load and query an ESRI Feature Service layer
`arc_read_encode()`	`arcgislayers::arc_read()` with coded-value encoding built in, so no stray helper objects are left in the environment
`load_ugrc_data()`, `load_ugrc_vars()`	Load a dataset, or list the datasets, from Utah’s SGID
`load_kml_sf()`	Convert KML to an `sf` object with attributes preserved
`st_aggregate()`	Aggregate `sf` objects
`geo_split_lines()`, `st_split_lines()`	Split lines by a maximum length
`convert_fgb_to_gdb()`	Convert FlatGeobuf files to geodatabase layers
`convert_xml_html()`, `extract_html_table()`	XML to HTML via XSLT, and pull a table out of an HTML page by its anchor
`load_packages()`	Load, installing first if needed

Several of these build on other people’s gists and are credited to them in the function documentation and the README.

The code is on GitHub under GPL-3.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@online{bhandari2025,
  author = {Bhandari, Pukar},
  title = {pukRhelpers: {A} {Personal} {Toolbox} of {R} {Helpers}},
  date = {2025-05-23},
  url = {https://ar-puuk.github.io/posts/pukrhelpers/},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Bhandari, Pukar. 2025. “pukRhelpers: A Personal Toolbox of R Helpers.” May 23. https://ar-puuk.github.io/posts/pukrhelpers/.

---
title: "pukRhelpers: A Personal Toolbox of R Helpers"
subtitle: Small utilities for ArcGIS services, UGRC data, KML and sf that I reused across projects
description: An R package collecting helper functions from my day-to-day data and GIS work. Maintained lightly.
author:
  - name: Pukar Bhandari
    email: pukar.bhandari@outlook.com
date: "2025-05-23"
categories: [R, Package, GIS, Open Source]
code-annotations: select
prefer-html: true
---

`pukRhelpers` is where the small functions I kept copying between projects ended up. It is a personal toolbox, not a polished library, and I only update it when my own work needs something. The package has continuous checks and test coverage set up, and documentation at [ar-puuk.github.io/pukRhelpers](https://ar-puuk.github.io/pukRhelpers/).

::: {.app-links}
[{{< fa book >}} Docs](https://ar-puuk.github.io/pukRhelpers/){.btn .btn-primary target="_blank" rel="noopener"}
[{{< fa brands github >}} GitHub](https://github.com/ar-puuk/pukRhelpers){.btn .btn-outline-secondary target="_blank" rel="noopener"}
:::

## Install

```r
pak::pak("ar-puuk/pukRhelpers") # <1>
install.packages("pukRhelpers", repos = "https://ar-puuk.r-universe.dev") # <2>
```

1. Straight from GitHub. `remotes::install_github()` and `devtools::install_github()` work too.
2. Or from my personal R-universe.

## What is in it

| Function | What it does |
|---|---|
| `load_esri()` | Load and query an ESRI Feature Service layer |
| `arc_read_encode()` | `arcgislayers::arc_read()` with coded-value encoding built in, so no stray helper objects are left in the environment |
| `load_ugrc_data()`, `load_ugrc_vars()` | Load a dataset, or list the datasets, from Utah's SGID |
| `load_kml_sf()` | Convert KML to an `sf` object with attributes preserved |
| `st_aggregate()` | Aggregate `sf` objects |
| `geo_split_lines()`, `st_split_lines()` | Split lines by a maximum length |
| `convert_fgb_to_gdb()` | Convert FlatGeobuf files to geodatabase layers |
| `convert_xml_html()`, `extract_html_table()` | XML to HTML via XSLT, and pull a table out of an HTML page by its anchor |
| `load_packages()` | Load, installing first if needed |

Several of these build on other people's gists and are credited to them in the function documentation and the [README](https://github.com/ar-puuk/pukRhelpers).

The code is on [GitHub](https://github.com/ar-puuk/pukRhelpers) under GPL-3.