Basic R guide: verbatim ? with knitr in R

Question

I'm producing an introductory R guide for my company. I'm doing a little demo of the R help function (shorthand)

?mean

This is in a knitr chunk:

<<eval=FALSE>>=
?mean
@

Output:

`?`(mean)

I would prefer that it outputs it as I type it, i.e. ?mean not ?(mean) (with backticks). Does anyone know of a workaround for this?

Thanks!

Apologies if this is a repeat question or has a very simple solution - it's not an easy topic to search for!

There a bazillion examples in the knitr documentation / site. Have you looked there? Also, if you want something _verbatim_ and unchanged by `knitr`, you could just use pure LaTeX in that particularly expression and not invoke knitr. — Dirk Eddelbuettel, Feb 04 '13 at 13:29
I've looked, but as I said, I don't really know how to search for that. I could do it verbatim, but I want to keep the way knitr formats the chunk. I guess that best hacky way to solve this is to copy the tex chunk that knitr produces and replace `?(mean)` with `?mean` manually. — dynamo, Feb 04 '13 at 13:43
Look at the existing vignettes on your system, find one you like and then at _its_ sources. — Dirk Eddelbuettel, Feb 04 '13 at 14:44

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 04 '13 at 14:58

4

Setting tidy=FALSE will give you the result you're looking for:

<<eval=FALSE, tidy=FALSE>>=
?mean
@

Output

?mean

answered Feb 04 '13 at 14:58

Josh O'Brien

1 Answers1