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spicy

spicy adds a dash of heat to data analysis, giving insights a whole new flavour! It is designed to make variable exploration and descriptive statistics fast, expressive, and easy to use.

What is spicy?

spicy is an R package for quick, consistent, and elegant exploration of data frames. It helps you:

  • Extract variable metadata and display compact summaries of dataset variables, including names, labels, values, classes, number of distinct non-missing values, number of valid observations, number of missing observations (varlist()). Similar to the “Variable View” in SPSS or the “Variables Manager” in Stata.
  • Compute frequency tables (freq()), row means (mean_n()), row sums (sum_n()), and row count of specific values (count_n()) with automatic handling of missing data.
  • Explore relationships between variables via cross-tabulations (cross_tab()), and Cramer’s V for categorical associations (cramer_v()).
  • Copy data or results directly to the clipboard (copy_clipboard()) for quick export.
  • Handle labelled, factor, Date, POSIXct, and other common types.

All with intuitive functions that produce clean, structured outputs.

Installation

You can install the development version of spicy from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("amaltawfik/spicy")

Example usage

Here are some quick examples using built-in datasets:

library(spicy)

# Get a summary of all variables
varlist(iris, tbl = TRUE)

# Tabulate frequencies
freq(iris$Species)

# Cross-tab with row percentages
cross_tab(mtcars, cyl, gear, percent = "row")

# Compute row-wise mean/sum (all values must be valid by default)
df <- data.frame(
      var1 = c(10, NA, 30, 40, 50),
      var2 = c(5, NA, 15, NA, 25),
      var3 = c(NA, 30, 20, 50, 10)
      )
mean_n(df)
sum_n(df)

All functions can be directly used in pipelines.

Why use spicy?

  • Clean, expressive output
  • Works well with labelled survey data
  • Handles weights, percentages, NA counts
  • Great for exploring data and variables, teaching, or reporting

Citation

If you use spicy in a publication or teaching material, please cite it as:

Tawfik, A. (2025). spicy: Tools for Data Management and Variable Exploration. R package version 0.1.0. https://github.com/amaltawfik/spicy

You can also get the citation in R format by typing:

citation("spicy")

License

This package is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.