How to use RSPerl
Source: http://www.omegahat.org/RSPerl/
How to install RSPerl
Download
The source RSPerl_0.92-1.tar.gz http://www.omegahat.org/RSPerl/RSPerl_0.92-1.tar.gz.
Rebuild R as a shared library
Note also that to use the R-in-Perl mechanism one must have built R as a shared library. (This is not necessary when calling Perl from R.) You can check if this has been done by checking to see if libR is in the directory $R_HOME/lib/. If this is not there, you are advised to clean the entire R distribution (with make distclean) so as to start from scratch and then configure and compile R using the—enable-R-shlib to R’s configuration script. The following sequence of commands should work.
cd $R_HOME make distclean ./configure --enable-R-shlib make
Installation
R CMD INSTALL -c -l <wherever> --configure-args='--with-in-perl' RSPerl_0.92-1.tar.gz
Configuratioin
If we run R inside Perl, we need to find both the R run-time library (libR.so) and also the RSPerl package which will get loaded when the R session is started. We also need to find some additional shared libraries/DLLs in the RSPerl package. For this, we need to make certain the dynamic loader can find all these DLLs.
Perl also needs to find the Perl code, i.e. the R.pm, RReferences.pm and the R.so files. We need to set $PERL5LIB to specify their location.
Additionally, we need to know where the R package is located if it is not installed into \(R_HOME/library/. This is done via \)R_LIBS
And if we are running R from within Perl we also need to tell the R engine where $R_HOME is.
As Michael Dondrup said, that’s a lot of environment variables to set. Typically we don’t have to set them all. If we install the R package into a personal library, that library is typically where we put lots of R packages and so it is in our \(R_LIBS variable already. Similarly, if we install the Perl code into a local Perl library, we will have that specified in our \)PERL5LIB environment variable. And if we are running Perl inside R, $R_HOME is already set when we start R and also finding libR.so is done for us.
So the main variables we might have to set are \(LD_LIBRARY_PATH and \)PERL5LIB if the Perl code is installed into the R package area, We provide two shell scripts to set these variables to the appropriate values. There is one for sh/bash-style shells and another for csh/tcsh-style shells named RSPerl.bsh and RSPerl.csh respectively. They are located in the RSPerl/scripts / directory of the installed package. These are not executable but rather intended to be sourced into an existing shell to set the variables for the remainder of that shell session.
Use
. RSPerl/scripts/RSPerl.bsh
or
source RSPerl/scripts/RSPerl.csh
How to use
Launch R from Perl
use lib "/picb/home5/augix/Library/R/RSPerl/perl/x86_64-linux-thread-multi"; #indicate the path for RSPerl module
use R;
&R::initR("--silent");
$x = &R::call("sum", (1,2,3));
$y = &R::call("sum", (1,2,$x));
print "Sum = $y\n";
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