3 minimal features for my dev.to api wrapper

I’ve made 3 very small features for my open source R package wrapping
the dev.to API.

create_new_article

Now that the main requirements for the file to post are stabilising,
I’ve written a quick and dirty function to make a boilerplate article:

create_new_article <-
  function(title,
           series = 'series',
           tags = '["tag1", "tag2"]',
           file = "") {
    boilerplate_frontmatter <-
      glue::glue(
        '---\ntitle: "{title}"\noutput: github_document\nseries: "{series}"\ntags: {tags}\n---'
      )

    cat(boilerplate_frontmatter, file = file)
  }

This will use the glue package to put
the strings in the function argument into the right place in the
boilerplate YAML front matter. If then uses cat to either print that
to screen, or to create a new file with it, if a file path is supplied.

main_image

If there is a main_image parameter in the YAML front matter that is
a url of an image, that image will be set as the cover image of the
post. I got this one from a photo by Julian
Dufort
on
Unsplash.
I believe that if you put an unsplash URL into this field that goes
directly to the image it is within their
license, though if anyone knows
something to the contrary please let me know. It’s the first time I have
used this service, despite hearing about it for years.

Collapse spaces tags

I recently fooled myself for a good ten minutes into thinking that there
was a problem with my API code yesterday when I kept getting a 422
response to putting a new article up, when in fact it was that I had a
space character in one of my tags. Now the post_new_article function
collapses any spaces it encounters in tags. Achieving this was a breeze
with purrr and
stringr:

purrr::map(file_frontmatter$tags, stringr::str_remove_all, " ")

This little nugget takes the list of tags, and then maps the function
str_remove_all across all the spaces. This isn’t at all exposed to the
user, as it’s non-negotiable from the API side anyway :)