R Markdown Tips

Things under legendu.net/outdated are outdated technologies that the author does not plan to update any more. Please look for better alternatives.

** Things under legendu.net/outdated are outdated technologies that the author does not plan to update any more. Please look for better alternatives. **

RMarkdown Reference

1. The rmarkdown package is preferred to the markdown package. There is also a small bug with the markdown package. markdown::markdownToHTML does not render markdown title of the format ##Title correct. A space is required after # for markdownToHTML to work. However, rmarkdown::render works well on both situations.

2. There are several ways to pass values between the R workspace and R Markdown. One way is to use global variables (from the R workspace) in R Markdown directly. However, you have to tell R Markdown the right working environment using the option envir = 0. Without this, R Markdown uses the current working environment which might not be the global working environment (e.g., when knit is called inside a function). Sometimes, it is more convenient to substitute patterns in R Markdown with required values directly. Make sure to use unique patterns if you do it in this. For example, if you want to pass a variable site by substituting into R Markdown, a good way is to replace pattern ${site} (instead of plain site) with the value of the variable site.

3. Avoid doing complicated calculations in RMakrdown. Separted the code for calculation, etc., and use rmakrdown for reporting purpose mostly ...,

4. plotly (for graphics) and DT (for tables) are great visualization tools to use with R Markdown.