I'd like to return the package license as declared in the DESCRIPTION file of an R package (ideally I'd rather have the URL that CRAN automatically adds to all the common licenses it recognizes).
I realize I can get the license R itself is distributed under with
license()
which amazingly doesn't apply to packages; e.g. license("packagename")
Nor is this data returned by a call to citation("packagename")
.
you are looking for packageDescription
eg:
packageDescription("stats", fields="License")
[1] "Part of R 2.15.3"
packageDescription("ggplot2", fields="License")
[1] "GPL-2"
If you want to get the licenses for all installed packages, then use the installed.packages
command.
Borrowing from the help page for this command:
lisc <- installed.packages(fields = "License")
To output the licenses to a csv file:
write.csv(lisc[,c(1,10)], "RPackageLicenses.csv")