How do you calculate cyclomatic complexity for R functions?

Question

Cyclomatic complexity measures how many possible branches can be taken through a function. Is there an existing function/tool to calculate it for R functions? If not, suggestions are appreciated for the best way to write one.

A cheap start towards this would be to count up all the occurences of if, ifelse or switch within your function. To get a real answer though, you need to understand when branches start and end, which is much harder. Maybe some R parsing tools would get us started?

Answer 1

You can use codetools::walkCode to walk the code tree. Unfortunately codetools' documentation is pretty sparse. Here's an explanation and sample to get you started.

walkCode takes an expression and a code walker. A code walker is a list that you create, that must contain three callback functions: handler, call, and leaf. (You can use the helper function makeCodeWalker to provide sensible default implementations of each.) walkCode walks over the code tree and makes calls into the code walker as it goes.

call(e, w) is called when a compound expression is encountered. e is the expression and w is the code walker itself. The default implementation simply recurses into the expression's child nodes (for (ee in as.list(e)) if (!missing(ee)) walkCode(ee, w)).

leaf(e, w) is called when a leaf node in the tree is encountered. Again, e is the leaf node expression and w is the code walker. The default implementation is simply print(e).

handler(v, w) is called for each compound expression and can be used to easily provide an alternative behavior to call for certain types of expressions. v is the character string representation of the parent of the compound expression (a little hard to explain--but basically <- if it's an assignment expression, { if it's the start of a block, if if it's an if-statement, etc.). If the handler returns NULL then call is invoked as usual; if you return a function instead, that's what's called instead of the function.

Here's an extremely simplistic example that counts occurrences of if and ifelse of a function. Hopefully this can at least get you started!

library(codetools)

countBranches <- function(func) {
  count <- 0
  walkCode(body(func), 
           makeCodeWalker(
             handler=function(v, w) {
               if (v == 'if' || v == 'ifelse')
                 count <<- count + 1
               NULL  # allow normal recursion
             },
             leaf=function(e, w) NULL))
  count
}

Answer 2

Also, I just found a new package called cyclocomp (released 2016). Check it out!