Resources for knitr chunks - r

I've been trying to find this on the web but haven't had any luck. I'm working on creating a report with R using knitr and was wondering if anyone knows of a good resource for all options involving <<>>=. I've seen some examples like <<setup, include=FALSE, cache=FALSE>>= but I don't know what these mean and would like to know what else I can do.

To let you close the question - everything is here: http://yihui.name/knitr/options/#chunk_options, I will just paste the most important (in my opinion) options below:
Code Evaluation
eval: (TRUE; logical) whether to evaluate the code chunk; it can also be a numeric vector to select which R expression(s) to evaluate, e.g. eval=c(1, 3, 4) or eval=-(4:5)
Text Results
echo: (TRUE; logical or numeric) whether to include R source code in the output file; besides TRUE/FALSE which completely turns on/off the source code, we can also use a numeric vector to select which R expression(s) to echo in a chunk, e.g. echo=2:3 means only echo the 2nd and 3rd expressions, and echo=-4 means to exclude the 4th expression
results: ('markup'; character) takes these possible values
markup: mark up the results using the output hook, e.g. put results in a special LaTeX
asis: output as-is, i.e., write raw results from R into the output document
hold: hold all the output pieces and push them to the end of a chunk
hide hide results; this option only applies to normal R output (not warnings, messages or errors)
collapse: (FALSE; logical; applies to Markdown output only) whether to, if possible, collapse all the source and output blocks from one code chunk into a single block (by default, they are written to separate <pre></pre> blocks)
warning: (TRUE; logical) whether to preserve warnings (produced by warning()) in the output like we run R code in a terminal (if FALSE, all warnings will be printed in the console instead of the output document); it can also take numeric values as indices to select a subset of warnings to include in the output
error: (TRUE; logical) whether to preserve errors (from stop()); by default, the evaluation will not stop even in case of errors!! if we want R to stop on errors, we need to set this option to FALSE
message: (TRUE; logical) whether to preserve messages emitted by message() (similar to warning)
include: (TRUE; logical) whether to include the chunk output in the final output document; if include=FALSE, nothing will be written into the output document, but the code is still evaluated and plot files are generated if there are any plots in the chunk, so you can manually insert figures; note this is the only chunk option that is not cached, i.e., changing it will not invalidate the cache.
Cache
cache: (FALSE; logical) whether to cache a code chunk; when evaluating code chunks, the cached chunks are skipped, but the objects created in these chunks are (lazy-) loaded from previously saved databases (.rdb and .rdx) files, and these files are saved when a chunk is evaluated for the first time, or when cached files are not found (e.g. you may have removed them by hand)
Plots
fig.path: ('figure/'; character) prefix to be used for figure filenames (fig.path and chunk labels are concatenated to make filenames); it may contain a directory like figure/prefix- (will be created if it does not exist); this path is relative to the current working directory
fig.width, fig.height: (both are 7; numeric) width and height of the plot, to be used in the graphics device (in inches) and have to be numeric
dev: ('pdf' for LaTeX output and 'png' for HTML/markdown; character) the function name which will be used as a graphical device to record plots
An examplary chunk:
```{r global_options, include = FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(fig.width = 9, fig.height = 4, fig.path = "Figs/", dev = "svg",
echo = FALSE, warning = FALSE, message = FALSE,
cache = FALSE, tidy = FALSE, size = "small")
```

Related

Disabling R diagnostics for Rmarkdown

Is there a way to disable R diagnostics for RMD file?
I'm running a simple preliminary code here and getting these warnings "Unknown or uninitialized column: xxx".
library(readr)
dataset = read_csv("breast_cancer.csv")
is.factor(dataset$cellularity)
is.factor(dataset$cancer_type_detailed)
A quick google search tells me these warnings are common with no way to fix it. At least I would like to know how to disable these in my RMD file. Also don't want to have to write in warnings=FALSE for every R chunk.
Link to dataset:
https://www.kaggle.com/raghadalharbi/breast-cancer-gene-expression-profiles-metabric
It's usually a bad idea to suppress warnings: very few of them are false positives. Suppressing them globally is a really bad idea.
In this case, the warnings signal that your dataset does not have columns with those names. From the str(dataset) information, we can see that there is a column named Cellularity and one named Cancer Type Detailed. Those don't match the names you used in your code, cellularity and cancer_type_detailed.
If you get a warning like this, you should examine the dataset to see what the names really are. One way is to print str(dataset); even better is to print names(dataset), which will show very clearly exactly what the names are.
There's one situation where you might not want to see that warning. If you are not sure if a column is included, you might use a test like
if (is.null(dataset$notthere)) { ... }
You'll get the warning from this code when dataset is a tibble. The way to avoid it is to use
if (is.null(dataset[["notthere"]])) ...
or
if (! "notthere" %in% names(dataset)) ...
You can globally hide warnings like this:
```{r setup, include = FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(warning = FALSE)
```
You add this chunk in the beginning of your Rmarkdown file and warnings are not shown anymore. You can also add other sommon chunk options there if you like.

kable all tables in markdown report [duplicate]

Using knitr and R Markdown, I can produce a tabularised output from a matrix using the following command:
```{r results='asis'}
kable(head(x))
```
However, I’m searching for a way to make the kable code implicit since I don’t want to clutter the echoed code with it. Essentially, I want this:
```{r table=TRUE}
head(x)
```
… to yield a formatted tabular (rather than the normal output='markdown') output.
I actually thought this must be pretty straightforward since it’s a pretty obvious requirement, but I cannot find any way to achieve this, either via the documentation or on the web.
My approach to create an output hook fails because once the data arrives at the hook, it’s already formatted and no longer the raw data. Even when specifying results='asis', the hook obtains the output as a character string and not as a matrix. Here’s what I’ve tried:
default_output_hook <- knit_hooks$get('output')
knit_hooks$set(output = function (x, options)
if (! is.null(options$table))
kable(x)
else
default_output_hook(x, options)
)
But like I said, this fails since x is not the original matrix but rather a character string, and it doesn’t matter which value for the results option I specify.
Nowadays one can set df_print in the YAML header:
---
output:
html_document:
df_print: kable
---
```{r}
head(iris)
```
I think other answers are from a time when the following didn't work, but now we can just do :
```{r results='asis', render=pander::pander}
head(x)
```
Or set this for all chunks in the setup chunk, for instance :
```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE, render=pander::pander)
```
Lacking a better solution I’m currently re-parsing the character string representation that I receive in the hook. I’m posting it here since it kind of works. However, parsing a data frame’s string representation is never perfect. I haven’t tried the following with anything but my own data and I fully expect it to break on some common use-cases.
reparse <- function (data, comment, ...) {
# Remove leading comments
data <- gsub(sprintf('(^|\n)%s ', comment), '\\1', data)
# Read into data frame
read.table(text = data, header = TRUE, ...)
}
default_output_hook <- knit_hooks$get('output')
knit_hooks$set(output = function (x, options)
if (is.null(options$table))
default_output_hook(x, options)
else {
extra_opts <- if (is.list(options$table)) options$table else list()
paste(kable(do.call(reparse, c(x, options$comment, extra_opts))),
collapse = '\n')
}
)
This will break if the R markdown comment option is set to a character sequence containing a regular expression special char (e.g. *), because R doesn’t seem to have an obvious means of escaping a regular expression.
Here’s a usage example:
```{r table=TRUE}
data.frame(A=1:3, B=4:6)
```
You can pass extra arguments to the deparse function. This is necessary e.g. when the table contains NA values because read.table by default interprets them as strings:
```{r table=list(colClasses=c('numeric', 'numeric'))}
data.frame(A=c(1, 2, NA, 3), B=c(4:6, NA))
```
Far from perfect, but at least it works (for many cases).
Not exactly what you are looking for, but I am posting an answer here (that could not fit in a comment) as your described workflow is really similar to what my initial goal and use-case was when I started to work on my pander package. Although I really like the bunch of chunk options that are available in knitr, I wanted to have an engine that makes creating documents really easy, automatic and without any needed tweaks. I am aware of the fact that knitr hooks are really powerful, but I just wanted to set a few things in my Rprofile and let the literate programming tool its job without further trouble, that ended to be Pandoc.brew for me.
The main idea is to specify a few options (what markdown flavour are you using, what's your decimal mark, favorite colors for your charts etc), then simply write your report in a brew syntax without any chunk options, and the results of your code would be automatically transformed to markdown. Then convert that to pdf/docx/odt etc. with Pandoc.

With knitr, preserve chunk options when purling chunks into separate files

For teaching purposes, I would like to purl the chunks of my .Rnw file into separate files. This answer explains how to do it:
How to purl each chunks in .Rmd file to multiple .R files using Knitr
BUT the method does not preserve the chunk options. Since the chunks I have produce plots, it's important to preserve the fig.width and fig.height options. Ideally I would like a chunk that looks like this:
<<plot, fig.width = 3, fig.height = 5, outwidth = '.75\\textwidth'>>=
plot (1,1)
#
to become a file named plot.R that looks like this:
#+ fig.width = 3, fig.height = 5
plot (1,1)
That is, turn the chunk options fig.width and fig.height into a format that will be recognized by spin(), as purl() does, and get rid of the chunk options that are irrelevant, or create problems for spin() into Word, such as out.width. All in the spirit of creating code files that are user-friendly.
Since the answer you refer to doesn't copy the header line from the results of purl, you lose everything besides the chunk name. While you could adapt it to paste in the headers, it's actually not hard to build a function to parse the output of purl—much easier than trying to parse a Rmd or Rnw document, anyway, and easier than sorting out exactly how knitr does so.
purl_chunks <- function(input_file){
purled <- knitr::purl(input_file) # purl original file; save name to variable
lines <- readLines(purled) # read purled file into a character vector of lines
starts <- grep('^## ----.*-+', lines) # use grep to find header row indices
stops <- c(starts[-1] - 1L, length(lines)) # end row indices
# extract chunk names from headers
names <- sub('^## ----([^-]([^,=]*[^,=-])*)[,-][^=].*', '\\1', lines[starts])
names <- ifelse(names == lines[starts], '', paste0('_', names)) # clean if no chunk name
# make nice file names with chunk number and name (if exists)
file_names <- paste0('chunk_', seq_along(starts), names, '.R')
for(chunk in seq_along(starts)){ # loop over header rows
# save the lines in the chunk to a file
writeLines(lines[starts[chunk]:stops[chunk]], con = file_names[chunk])
}
unlink(purled) # delete purled file of entire document
}
A couple notes:
While the regex works for what I've thrown at it, it may yet be fallible. Tested:
no chunk name
no name but chunk settings
name with hyphens
single character names
names with spaces, including after (before the comma/brace)
As .Rnw and .Rmd files both purl the same, it works for either.
It uses the default setting (1L) for purl's documentation parameter. 0L wouldn't have chunk headers and is thus pointless here anyway, but it would handle 2L (which would include text chunks as roxygen comments) stupidly. It could be rebuilt for such, though, if you wanted text chunks with the following code chunk.
While the output header lines of purl don't look exactly like your example above (they start with ## ---- and are filled with hyphens), they spin properly; results obey chunk options.

Use hooks to format table in output

Using knitr and R Markdown, I can produce a tabularised output from a matrix using the following command:
```{r results='asis'}
kable(head(x))
```
However, I’m searching for a way to make the kable code implicit since I don’t want to clutter the echoed code with it. Essentially, I want this:
```{r table=TRUE}
head(x)
```
… to yield a formatted tabular (rather than the normal output='markdown') output.
I actually thought this must be pretty straightforward since it’s a pretty obvious requirement, but I cannot find any way to achieve this, either via the documentation or on the web.
My approach to create an output hook fails because once the data arrives at the hook, it’s already formatted and no longer the raw data. Even when specifying results='asis', the hook obtains the output as a character string and not as a matrix. Here’s what I’ve tried:
default_output_hook <- knit_hooks$get('output')
knit_hooks$set(output = function (x, options)
if (! is.null(options$table))
kable(x)
else
default_output_hook(x, options)
)
But like I said, this fails since x is not the original matrix but rather a character string, and it doesn’t matter which value for the results option I specify.
Nowadays one can set df_print in the YAML header:
---
output:
html_document:
df_print: kable
---
```{r}
head(iris)
```
I think other answers are from a time when the following didn't work, but now we can just do :
```{r results='asis', render=pander::pander}
head(x)
```
Or set this for all chunks in the setup chunk, for instance :
```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE, render=pander::pander)
```
Lacking a better solution I’m currently re-parsing the character string representation that I receive in the hook. I’m posting it here since it kind of works. However, parsing a data frame’s string representation is never perfect. I haven’t tried the following with anything but my own data and I fully expect it to break on some common use-cases.
reparse <- function (data, comment, ...) {
# Remove leading comments
data <- gsub(sprintf('(^|\n)%s ', comment), '\\1', data)
# Read into data frame
read.table(text = data, header = TRUE, ...)
}
default_output_hook <- knit_hooks$get('output')
knit_hooks$set(output = function (x, options)
if (is.null(options$table))
default_output_hook(x, options)
else {
extra_opts <- if (is.list(options$table)) options$table else list()
paste(kable(do.call(reparse, c(x, options$comment, extra_opts))),
collapse = '\n')
}
)
This will break if the R markdown comment option is set to a character sequence containing a regular expression special char (e.g. *), because R doesn’t seem to have an obvious means of escaping a regular expression.
Here’s a usage example:
```{r table=TRUE}
data.frame(A=1:3, B=4:6)
```
You can pass extra arguments to the deparse function. This is necessary e.g. when the table contains NA values because read.table by default interprets them as strings:
```{r table=list(colClasses=c('numeric', 'numeric'))}
data.frame(A=c(1, 2, NA, 3), B=c(4:6, NA))
```
Far from perfect, but at least it works (for many cases).
Not exactly what you are looking for, but I am posting an answer here (that could not fit in a comment) as your described workflow is really similar to what my initial goal and use-case was when I started to work on my pander package. Although I really like the bunch of chunk options that are available in knitr, I wanted to have an engine that makes creating documents really easy, automatic and without any needed tweaks. I am aware of the fact that knitr hooks are really powerful, but I just wanted to set a few things in my Rprofile and let the literate programming tool its job without further trouble, that ended to be Pandoc.brew for me.
The main idea is to specify a few options (what markdown flavour are you using, what's your decimal mark, favorite colors for your charts etc), then simply write your report in a brew syntax without any chunk options, and the results of your code would be automatically transformed to markdown. Then convert that to pdf/docx/odt etc. with Pandoc.

Warning in knitr

I'm using knitr 0.5 for my analysis and it throws this warning
Warning in parse_params(params) :
(*) NOTE: I saw options " label = TrtScores-SD-Response, echo = FALSE, results = asis"
are you using the old Sweave syntax? go http://yihui.name/knitr/options
for this chunck
<< label = TrtScores-SD-Response, echo = FALSE, results = asis >>=
R code
#
and knitr 0.5 becomes very slow. Any idea to overcome this warning. Thanks
You just need to add quotes around the results argument, like this:
<< label = TrtScores-SD-Response, echo = FALSE, results = "asis" >>=
R code
#
As documented at http://yihui.name/knitr/options (the web page to which the error message thoughtfully directed you):
All option values, except the chunk label, must be valid R expressions just like how we write function arguments. For example, options that take character values must be quoted as you do in R (e.g. should write fig.path="abc" instead of fig.path=abc, and out.width='\textwidth' instead of out.width=\textwidth)
And then later on the same page:
results: ('markup'; character) takes three possible values
See also the "Transition from Sweave to knitr" page, which addresses this and other differences between Sweave and knitr. Like all of Yihui's documentation, it's excellently put together.

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