Using parameters in Rmarkdown

Nothing new or original here, just something that I learned about quite recently that may be useful for others.

One of my more “popular” code repositories, judging by Twitter, is – well, Twitter . It mostly contains Rmarkdown reports which summarise meetings and conferences by analysing usage of their associated Twitter hashtags.

The reports follow a common template where the major difference is simply the hashtag. So one way to create these reports is to use the previous one, edit to find/replace the old hashtag with the new one, and save a new file.

That works…but what if we could define the hashtag once, then reuse it programmatically anywhere in the document? Enter Rmarkdown parameters .

Here’s an example .Rmd file . It’s fairly straightforward: just include a params: section in the YAML header at the top and include variables as key-value pairs:

---
params:
  hashtag: "#amca19"
  max_n: 18000
  timezone: "US/Eastern"
title: "Twitter Coverage of `r params$hashtag`"
author: "Neil Saunders"
date: "`r Sys.time()`"
output:
  github_document
---

Then, wherever you want to include the value for the variable named hashtag , simply use params$hashtag , as in the title shown here or in later code chunks.

``{r search-twitter}
tweets <- search_tweets(params$hashtag, params$max_n)
saveRDS(tweets, "tweets.rds")
```

That's it! There may still be some customisation and editing specific to each report, but parameters go a long way to minimising that work.