R/clean_render.R

In mattsigal/mmisc: Matt's Miscellaneous Functions for MHS

#' Clean Rendering of Embedded RMarkdown Documents
#'
#' \code{clean_render} is a utility function for knitting embedded R Markdown documents. This
#' circumvents the write access error that typically occurs if you call `rmarkdown::render()`
#' from within an Rmarkdown document by opening a new instance of R to render the sub-document,
#' rendering it, and then deleting the temporary file.
#'
#' @param toRender A string pertaining to the Rmd file to be rendered (no extension)
#' @param outDir The directory rendered reports should be saved to
#' @param extension A string pertaining to the extension to use for the knit report, default is .pdf.
#' @return NULL

clean_render <- function(toRender = NULL, outDir = NULL, extension = ".pdf") {
  file <- paste0(toRender, ".Rmd")
  if (is.null(outDir)) {
    output <- paste0(toRender, extension)
  } else output <- paste0(outDir, "/", toRender, extension)
  cat('
      rmarkdown::render("', file,'", output_file = "', output,'", quiet = TRUE)
      ', sep = "", file = "tempRender.R")
  devtools::clean_source('tempRender.R', quiet = TRUE)
  file.remove("tempRender.R")
  return("Render complete.")
}