Is it possible to specify command line parameters to R-script in RStudio?

Question

I want to use RStudio to edit an R-script having command line parameters, e.g.,

my_rscript --dataset mydataset

and then to read the optiion

Answer 1

If you're interested in using e.g. argparser and continue developing/analyzing interactively using Rstudio, you can use the following work-around:

1. Write your command line parser in my_rscript and create an object args that contains all parsed input.
2. Add a line that saves args object to file.
3. Run my_rscript from command line and specify arguments of interest.
4. Load the args object from file in Rstudio and continue interactively

Example:

library("argparser")
parser <- arg_parser(description='Process commandline arguments')
parser <- add_argument(parser, arg="--dataset", type="character", help = "Dataset argument")
args = parse_args(parser)
args_file = "tempArgObjectFile.rds"
saveRDS(args, args_file); print(args); quit(); #comment this after creating args_file
args = readRDS(args_file)  #use this to load during interactive development