available.packages by publication date <p>Is it possible to get the publication date of CRAN packages from within R? I would like to get a list of the k most recently published CRAN packages, or alternatively all packages published after date dd-mm-yy. Similar to the information on the <a href="http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html">available_packages_by_date.html</a>? </p> <p>The available.packages() command has a "fields" argument, but this only extracts fields from the DESCRIPTION. The date field on the package description is not always up-to-date.</p> <p>I can get it with a smart regex from the <a href="http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html">html page</a>, but I am not sure how reliable and up-to-date the this html file is... At some point Kurt might decide to give the layout a makeover which would break the script. An alternative is to use timestamps from the <a href="ftp://cran.r-project.org/pub/R/src/contrib/">CRAN FTP</a> but I am also not sure how good this solution is. I am not sure if there is somewhere a formally structured file with publication dates? I assume the HTML page is automatically generated from some DB.</p>