Programatically generate R markdown code chunk - r

I'm creating a tutorial that involves telling the reader what to put into a file we'll call utils.R. The user would get the tutorial as an HTML file. Throughout the tutorial utils.R changes and the Rmd document uses the code in utils.R as it exists at that stage of the tutorial. During the rendering, I'd like for the code chunks to use source("utils.R") as it exists at that stage of the tutorial. I'm looking for a way to either...
1. Write the contents of a code chunk to a file. For example...
```{r utils_1}
summary(cars)
median(cars$speed)
```
Is there a way to write the code in utils_1 to a file?
2. Create a nicely formatted code chunk from a text string (I know how to write that to a file). For example...
z <- "summary(cars)\nmedian(cars$speed)"
write(z, "utils.R")
Will generate utils.R, but is there a way to turn z into a properly formatted code chunk.
I could create multiple versions of utils.R and use echo=F to hide that I'm loading that behind the scenes, but that seems like a pain.

Not sure if this is what are you looking for but you can use child option to generate them from another file. I use it for automated reports as it helps to keep the main Rmd a bit simpler
```{r child=utils.R}
```
I often place the child code in the YAML though, and call it (matter of tastes I guess...):
---
params:
utils: "utils.R"
---
```{r child=params$utils}
```

Related

static image of targets workflow, programatically

I'm trying to embed a static image of a targets workflow in an rmarkdown document. I tried to do this by using tar_mermaid, defining a target that writes the workflow in mermaid format mm <- tar_mermaid(); writeLines(mm, "target_mermaid.js") but the help for tar_mermaid says
You can visualize the graph by copying
the text into a public online mermaid.js editor or a mermaid GitHub code chunk
I am looking for a programmatic way to either (1) embed the Javascript output in an (R)markdown file, or (2) render it (as SVG, PNG, whatever).
I thought as a shortcut that I could cut-and-paste into a markdown code chunk delimited by ```mermaid, or use cat(readLines("target_mermaid.js"), sep = "\n") in a chunk with results = "asis" but I guess that only works in Github markdown (I'm using Pandoc to render to HTML) ... ?
The visNetwork package has a visSave() function which can save to HTML (not quite what I wanted but better than what I've managed so far), and a visExport() function (which saves to PNG etc. but only by clicking in a web browser). Furthermore, targets wraps the visNetwork functions in a way that is (so far) hard for me to unravel (i.e., it doesn't return a visNetwork object, but automatically returns a widget ...)
For the time being I can go to https://mermaid.live, paste in the mermaid code, and export the PNG manually but I really want to do it programmatically (i.e. as part of my workflow, without manual steps involved).
I am not quite sure about the answer. But I have an idea. And I will delete if it is not adequate:
If you want execute mermaid code to get for example an html output then you could do this with quarto. I am not sure if this is possible with rmarkdown:
See https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/diagrams.htmlS
---
title: "Untitled"
format: html
editor: visual
---
## Quarto
Quarto enables you to weave together content and executable code into a finished document. To learn more about Quarto see <https://quarto.org>.
## Running Code
```{mermaid}
flowchart LR
A[Hard edge] --> B(Round edge)
B --> C{Decision}
C --> D[Result one]
C --> E[Result two]
```
output:
#landau's suggestion to look here almost works, if I'm willing to use Quarto instead of Rmarkdown (GH Markdown is not an option). The cat() trick was the main thing I was missing. The .qmd file below gets most of the way there but has the following (cosmetic) issues:
I don't know how to suppress the tidyverse startup messages, because targets is running the visualization code in a separate R instance that the user has (AFAIK) little control of;
the default size of the graph is ugly.
Any further advice would be welcome ...
---
title: "targets/quarto/mermaid example"
---
```{r}
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("tidyverse"))
library("targets")
```
```{r, results = "asis", echo = FALSE}
cat(c("```{mermaid}", tar_mermaid(), "```"), sep = "\n")
```
Beginning of document:
Zooming out:

Converting R code to Markdown or RNotebok

Hi I'm asked to do an assignment, which requests to submit RNotebook (or Markdown) as html files for grading. This is a machine learning assignment.
What I need to know it, I'm going to use RStudio for the assignment. Can you please let me knwo is RNotebook / Markdown is another platform to use? Once the coding is done can I convert it to Markdown?
Within R studio, you can choose R markdown .
Navigate to File Option -> New File -> R Markdown
There are no changes in coding. All codes that you write in R would be as-is. Just with a flexibility that you can add comments and explain your code.
Make sure in .Rmd file, there are {} clauses. don't make any changes to it while writing code.
You will observe below chunk in .Rmd file. Make sure you should not delete {} but you may write any heading within these brackets.Followed by these brackets, you can write your code.
```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```

produce standalone html for chunks of an Rmarkdown document

I am searching for a way to produce a standalone HTML document from a chunk in Rmarkdown.
My example is this:
I have an Rmarkdown document for my analysis.
In one chunk of code, I produce interactive plotly plots that are quit long to load when I open the HTML.
I am looking for an option that would create another HTML document for this particular chunk and put a link to it in its place in the master HTML document.
I am sure I could manage to do something like that with a bit of tweaking with another script, but I would like to know if there is not a simpler option first.
Thanks
Yes, you can nest documents using knitr child documents. Put the chunk you want to isolate in its own Rmd (say, child.Rmd), then use this syntax to insert it in the master document:
```{r child='child.Rmd'}
```

R Markdown – a concise way to print all code snippets used in the document

I'm writing a report in R Markdown in which I don't want to print any of my R code in the main body of the report – I just want to show plots, calculate variables that I substitute into the text inline, and sometimes show a small amount of raw R output. Therefore, I write something like this:
In the following plot, we see that blah blah blah:
```{r snippetName, echo=F}
plot(df$x, df$y)
```
Now...
That's all well and good. But I would also like to provide the R code at the end of the document for anybody curious to see how it was produced. Right now I have to manually write something like this:
Here is snippet 1, and a description of what section of the report
this belongs to and how it's used:
```{r snippetName, eval=F}
```
Here is snippet 2:
```{r snippetTwoName, eval=F}
```
<!-- and so on for 20+ snippets -->
This gets rather tedious and error-prone once there are more than a few code snippets. Is there any way I could loop over the snippets and print them out automatically? I'm hoping I could do something like:
```{r snippetName, echo=F, comment="This is snippet 1:"}
# the code for this snippet
```
and somehow substitute the following result into the document at a specified point when it's knitted:
This is snippet 1:
```{r snippetName, eval=F}
```
I suppose I could write some post-processing code to scan through the .Rmd file, find all the snippets, and pull out the code with a regex or something (I seem to remember there's some kind of options file you can use to inject commands into the pandoc process?), but I'm hoping there might be something simpler.
Edit: This is definitely not a duplicate – if you read my question thoroughly, the last code block shows me doing exactly what the answer to the linked question suggests (with a slight difference in syntax, which could have been the source of the confusion?). I'm looking for a way to not have to write out that last code block manually for all 20+ snippets in the document.
This is do-able within knitr, no need to use pandoc. Based on an example posted by Yihui at https://github.com/yihui/knitr-examples/blob/master/073-code-appendix.Rnw
Set echo=FALSE throughout your document: opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE)
Then put this chunk at the end to print all code:
```{r show-code, ref.label=all_labels(), echo = TRUE, eval=FALSE}
```
This will print code for all chunks. Currently they all show up in a single block; I'd love to figure out how to put in the chunk label or some other header... For now I start my chunks with comments (probably not a bad idea in any case).
Updated: to show only the chunks that were evaluated, use:
ref.label = all_labels(!exists('engine')) - see question 40919201
Since this is quite difficult if not impossible to do with knitr, we can take advantage of the next step, the pandoc compilation, and of pandoc's ability to manipulate content with filters. So we write a normal Rmd document with echo=TRUE and the code chunks are printed as usual when they are called.
Then, we write a filter that finds every codeblock of language R (this is how a code chunk will be coded in pandoc), removes it from the document (replacing it, here, with an empty paragraph) and storing it in a list. We then add the list of all codeblocks at the end of the document. For this last step, the problem is that there really is no way to tell a python filter to add content at the end of a document (there might be a way in haskell, but I don't know it). So we need to add a placeholder at the end of the Rmd document to tell the filter to add the R code at this point. Here, I consider that the placeholder will be a CodeBlock with code lastchunk.
Here is the filter, which we could save as postpone_chunks.py.
#!/usr/bin/env python
from pandocfilters import toJSONFilter, Str, Para, CodeBlock
chunks = []
def postpone_chunks(key, value, format, meta):
if key == 'CodeBlock':
[[ident, classes, keyvals], code] = value
if "r" in classes:
chunks.append(CodeBlock([ident, classes, keyvals], code))
return Para([Str("")])
elif code == 'lastchunk':
return chunks
if __name__ == "__main__":
toJSONFilter(postpone_chunks)
Now, we can ask knitr to execute it with pandoc_args. Note that we need to remember to add the placeholder at the end of the document.
---
title: A test
output:
html_document:
pandoc_args: ["--filter", "postpone_chunks.py"]
---
Here is a plot.
```{r}
plot(iris)
```
Here is a table.
```{r}
table(iris$Species)
```
And here are the code chunks used to make them:
lastchunk
There is probably a better way to write this in haskell, where you won't need the placeholder. One could also customize the way the code chunks are returned at the end to add a title before each one for instance.

Ending a document in r Markdown and continuing with code

I am writing a report using r markdown. However, after this report is produced I would like to continue to analyse the data without having to open up a new editor window.
I was wondering if there is a simple command I could use to express the end of the document?
Thanks.
It appears that you are not necessarily interested in ending your markdown document but in hiding your results. The code below will enable you to continue the analysis in the same window and to exclude it from appearing in the core document when compiled.
```{r results='hide', message=FALSE, warning=FALSE}
# Stuff that you want to do
```
For a more detailed explanation, you may want to have a look at the Chunk Options in the knitr documentation.

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