When analyzing data sets in R, it is often convenient to wrap the analysis within a quarto document for reporting purposes: containing all the analysis components within a single easy-to-navigate HTML document is generally a kindness for the reader. One consequence of this is that sometimes you find yourself wanting to write code within an R code chunk that will generate parts of the quarto document for you. For instance, when iterating over many analyses within a single R chunk, you might want to have that chunk generate the quarto section headers, tabsets and so on. This is possible because the knitr engine (which evaluates the R code chunks) allows you to generate “asis” output that will later be captured by the quarto parser; if such output is formatted to look like correct quarto syntax, it will be captured and translated to the appropriate HTML.
The purpose of the quartose package is to provide some helper functions to make this task a little easier. The reason for writing it is that while it is conceptually straightforward to generate quarto syntax within R, there are some practical issues in juggling knitr, quarto, and R all at once if you want the resulting document to look clean. The goal in writing the quartose package is to handle some of those niceties, making it a little easier to work programmatically within quarto documents.
Installation
You can install the development version of quartose from GitHub with:
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("djnavarro/quartose")Example
The core idea is illustrated with this example:
library(quartose)
# define a quarto tabset
tabs <- quarto_tabset(
content = list(tab1 = 1:5, tab2 = "hello"),
title = "My tabs",
level = 2
)
# base::print() outputs a simple summary
print(tabs)
#> <quarto_tabset>
#> • content: <list>
#> • title: My tabs
#> • names: tab1 tab2
#> • level: 2
# knitr::knit_print() outputs quarto syntax
knitr::knit_print(tabs)
#>
#>
#> ## My tabs
#>
#>
#>
#>
#> ::: {.panel-tabset}
#>
#>
#>
#>
#> ### tab1
#>
#>
#> <pre>
#> [1] 1 2 3 4 5
#> </pre>
#>
#>
#> ### tab2
#>
#>
#> <pre>
#> [1] "hello"
#> </pre>
#>
#>
#> :::
#>
#> Related work
It is of course inevitable that the moment you start work on something and talk to people about it, it turns out that other people have done similar work. So far I’ve discovered two other approaches to the problem. They’re not identical or equivalent to what I’m attempting to do here, but they’re definitely thinking about the same ideas. To that end, I’d encourage anyone thinking about quartose to also look into these packages: