I was playing with R Markdown in R Studio and thought I’d share my results. I can’t believe how easy this is to use! In R Studio, just go File…New…R Markdown. This opens a new template with some helpful code ready to use. This is your Rmd file. It’s basically a script file, except not only can you submit R code from this file, you can also save the output and graphs into one fancy HTML page. This is so much easier than copying-and-pasting R code into a Word Press post and saving/uploading/linking to images created in R. For example, see this post I wrote a while back. It took a long time to make.
Anyway, when you’re done, you click the Knit HTML button and your Rmd file is “knitted” into an HTML file. There’s a little bit of extra code you need to use to ensure proper formatting, but it’s super easy to use. Check out this page to see how easy it is to use. You just surround chunks of your R code in some simple markup.
So here’s what I did. First I worked through the Introductory session of Modern Applied Statistics with S (MASS) by Venables and Ripley. Here is my Rmd file and final output. Next I worked problem 4 from chapter 3 from Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models by Gelman and Hill. Here’s the Rmd file and final output. The final output links are the cool parts. Those are just HTML files with embedded images. I uploaded the Rmd files so you could see the marked-up R code. As you’ll see, there’s not much there. If you want your R code and associated output and graphs to be nicely formatted in HTML, just surround it with
```....```{r}
That’s it. You can also create headers using double-asterisks.