When this package was written,
we also wrote a Shiny web app for it but separated the actual calculations from the app's code.
This allowed us to use the same functions and objects in RMarkdown. We were discussing the numbers in the web tool
using permalinks, and finally transferred the calculations to the PDF version.
To transfer the configuration from the web app to the markdown document,
this function discards the URL prefix and splits
the arguments into a named list that behaves like the input object commonly used in Shiny apps.