R: Search NCBI for children of a taxon

ncbi_children {taxize} | R Documentation

## Search NCBI for children of a taxon

### Description

Search the NCBI Taxonomy database for uids of children of taxa. Taxa can be referenced by name or uid. Referencing by name is faster.

In a few cases, different taxa have the same name (e.g. Satyrium; see examples). If one of these are searched for then the children of both taxa will be returned. This can be avoided by using a uid instead of the name or specifying an ancestor. If an ancestor is provided, only children of both the taxon and its ancestor are returned. This will only fail if there are two taxa with the same name and the same specified ancestor.

### Usage

    ncbi_children(name = NULL, id = NULL, start = 0, max_return = 1000,
      ancestor = NULL, out_type = c("summary", "uid"), ambiguous = FALSE, ...)

### Arguments

`name` | (`character`) The string to search for. Only exact matches found the name given will be returned. Not compatible with `id`.
`id` | (`character`) The uid to search for. Not compatible with `name`.
`start` | The first record to return. If omitted, the results are returned from the first record (start=0).
`max_return` | (`numeric; length=1`) The maximum number of children to return.
`ancestor` | (`character`) The ancestor of the taxon being searched for. This is useful if there could be more than one taxon with the same name. Has no effect if `id` is used.
`out_type` | (character) Currently either `"summary"` or `"uid"`: summary The output is a list of `data.frame` with children uid, name, and rank. uid A list of character vectors of children uids
`ambiguous` | `logical; length 1` If `FALSE`, children taxa with words like "unclassified", "unknown", "uncultured", or "sp." are removed from the output. NOTE: This option only applies when `out_type = "summary"`.
`...` | Curl options passed on to `GET`

### Value

The output type depends on the value of the `out_type` parameter. Taxa that cannot be found will result in `NA`s and a lack of children results in an empty data structure.

### Author(s)

Zachary Foster zacharyfoster1989@gmail.com

### See Also

`ncbi_get_taxon_summary`, `children`

### Examples

    ## Not run:
    ncbi_children(name="Satyrium") #Satyrium is the name of two different genera
    ncbi_children(name="Satyrium", ancestor="Eumaeini") # A genus of butterflies
    ncbi_children(name="Satyrium", ancestor="Orchidaceae") # A genus of orchids
    ncbi_children(id="266948") #"266948" is the uid for the butterfly genus
    ncbi_children(id="62858") #"62858" is the uid for the orchid genus

    # use curl options
    library("httr")
    ncbi_children(name="Satyrium", ancestor="Eumaeini", config=verbose())

    ## End(Not run)

[Package taxize version 0.9.0 Index]