This question is similar to consistent code html inline and in chunks with knitr. Instead of .Rhtml documents, I want to highlight inline R code in R Markdown documents, e.g., after `r "plot(cars, main = 'A scatterplot.')"`
is compiled through rmarkdown, the tokens like plot
should be highlighted. By default, R code chunks are syntax highlighted, but there is no way to highlight inline R code.
Here is one solution using the highr package. Basically you just define your custom LaTeX commands to highlight the tokens. highr:::cmd_pandoc_latex
is a data frame of LaTeX commands that Pandoc uses to do syntax highlighting.
head(highr:::cmd_pandoc_latex)
## cmd1 cmd2
## COMMENT \\CommentTok{ }
## FUNCTION \\NormalTok{ }
## IF \\NormalTok{ }
## ELSE \\NormalTok{ }
## WHILE \\NormalTok{ }
## FOR \\NormalTok{ }
Then you can redefine the inline
hook of knitr:
---
output:
pdf_document:
keep_tex: yes
---
```{r include=FALSE}
local({
hi_pandoc = function(code) {
if (knitr:::pandoc_to() != 'latex') return(code)
if (packageVersion('highr') < '0.6.1') stop('highr >= 0.6.1 is required')
res = highr::hi_latex(code, markup = highr:::cmd_pandoc_latex)
sprintf('\\texttt{%s}', res)
}
hook_inline = knitr::knit_hooks$get('inline')
knitr::knit_hooks$set(inline = function(x) {
if (is.character(x) && inherits(x, 'AsIs')) hi_pandoc(x) else hook_inline(x)
})
})
```
Test inline R code: `r I("plot(cars, main = 'A scatterplot.')")`.
Normal inline code `r pi`.
A code block:
```r
plot(cars, main = 'A scatterplot.')
1 + 2 # a comment
```
I used I()
as a convenient marker to tell the character strings to be syntax highlighted from normal character strings. It is just an arbitrary choice. PDF output:
This is not a perfect solution, though. You will need to tweak it in some cases. For example, most special LaTeX characters are not escaped, such as ~
. You may need to process the LaTeX code returned by hi_pandoc()
by gsub()
.
Personally I find multiple colors in inline output distracting, so I would not syntax highlighting it, but this is entirely personal taste.