Last Saturday I met the guys from
RStudio at the
R in Finance conference in Chicago. I was curious to find out what RStudio could offer. In the past I have used mostly
Emacs +
ESS for editing R files. Well, and what a surprise it was. JJ, Joe and Josh showed me a preview of
version 0.96 of their software, which adds a close integration of
Sweave and
knitr to RStudio, helping to create dynamic web reports with the new R Markdown and R HTML formats more easily.
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Screen shot of RStudio with a knitr file (*.Rmd) in the top left window. Notice also the integrated knitr button. |
You probably have come across Sweave in the past, but
knitr is a fairly new package by
Yihui Xie that brings
literate programming to a new level. In particular the
markdown approach allows me to create web content really quickly, without worrying to much about layout and R formatting. I begin to wonder if PDF and paper will be replaced by tablets and HTML5 in the future.
Here is a simple example. The
knitr source code is available on
Github.
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