A Visual Prelude - Components of an R Markdown Document

A Visual Prelude - Components of an R Markdown Document#

So far we have installed the rmarkdown package for producing Markdown documents in R, and used it to initialise a blank R Markdown document. It is worthwhile noting that, whereas standard Markdown files hold the .md file extention, raw R Markdown documents instead carry the .Rmd file extension.

What does a complete R Markdown document look like?#

Adding contents to a raw R Markdown file will ultimately lead to something in the RStudio window that looks like the following:

Completed RMarkdown view

What are the main components of an R Markdown document?#

The above image provides a snapshot of the core components that make up an R Markdown document, namely:

  1. The YAML header

  2. Formatted plain text

  3. Embedded code

We will explore each of these in more detail throughout the course of this workshop.

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