read_chunk: Read chunks from an external script

Description

Chunks can be put in an external script, and this function reads chunks into the current knitr session; read_demo() is a convenience function to read a demo script from a package.

Usage

read_chunk(path, lines = readLines(path, warn = FALSE), labels = NULL, from = NULL, 
    to = NULL, from.offset = 0L, to.offset = 0L)
read_demo(topic, package = NULL, ...)

Arguments

path

the path to the R script

lines

a character vector of the code lines (by default read from path)

labels

a character vector of chunk labels (default NULL)

from,to

a numeric vector specifying the starting/ending line numbers of code chunks, or a character vector; see Details

from.offset,to.offset

an offset to be added to from/to

topic,package

name of the demo and the package see demo

...

arguments to be passed to read_chunk

Value

As a side effect, code chunks are read into the current session so that future chunks can (re)use the code by chunk label references.

Details

There are two approaches to read external code into the current session: (1) Use a special separator of the from

## @knitr chunk-label} in the script; (2) Manually
  specify the labels, starting and ending positions of code
  chunks in the script.
  The second approach will be used only when labels
  is not NULL. For this approach, if from is
  NULL, the starting position is 1; if to is
  NULL, each of its element takes the next element
  of from minus 1, and the last element of to
  will be the length of lines (e.g. when from
  = c(1, 3, 8) and the script has 10 lines in total,
  to will be c(2, 7, 10)). Alternatively,
  from and to can be character vectors as
  regular expressions to specify the positions; when their
  length is 1, the single regular expression will be
  matched against the lines vector, otherwise each
  element of from/to is matched against
  lines and the match is supposed to be unique so
  that the numeric positions returned from grep()
  will be of the same length of from/to. Note
  labels always has to match the length of
  from and to.

This function can only be used in a chunk which is not cached (chunk option cache = FALSE), and the code is read and stored in the current session without being executed (to actually run the code, you have to use a chunk with a corresponding label). ## put this in foo.R and read_chunk('foo.R')

## @knitr my-label 1 + 1 lm(y ~ x, data = data.frame(x = 1:10, y = rnorm(10)))

## later you can use <>= to reference this chunk

## the 2nd approach code = c("#@a", "1+1", "#@b", "#@a", "rnorm(10)", "#@b") read_chunk(lines = code, labels = "foo") # put all code into one chun named foo read_chunk(lines = code, labels = "foo", from = 2, to = 2) # line 2 into chunk foo read_chunk(lines = code, labels = c("foo", "bar"), from = c(1, 4), to = c(3, 6)) read_chunk(lines = code, labels = c("foo", "bar"), from = c(1, 4)) # automatically figure out 'to' read_chunk(lines = code, labels = c("foo", "bar"), from = "^#@a", to = "^#@b") read_chunk(lines = code, labels = c("foo", "bar"), from = "^#@a", to = "^#@b", from.offset = 1, to.offset = -1)

## later you can use, e.g., <>= knitr:::knit_code$get() # use this to check chunks in the current session knitr:::knit_code$restore() # clean up the session

[object Object] http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/reference/