Inline R code in YAML for rmarkdown doesn't run

Question

I\'m trying to run inline R code in the YAML front matter before getting rmarkdown to run the file. However it isn\'t working for me. Here\'s an example:

Answer 1

So I found a round about way of getting what I wanted. Rmarkdown I don't think allows R expressions/commands in the YAML, probably for a good reason. What I ended up doing was putting all the output yaml commands in a file called _output.Ryaml like so:

beamer_presentation:
  slide_level: 2
  includes:
    in_header: "src/preamble.tex"
  pandoc_args: [
    "--bibliography", "`r paste('path/to/bib')`",
    "--variable", "classoption:xcolor=dvipsnames",
    "--variable", "fontsize:9pt"
    ]

Then in the main slides.Rmd file, was something like:

---
title: "**Title**"
author: Luke
---


## Intro ##

Then, I can generate the slides using the R code (which I put into a Makefile):

knitr::knit('_output.Ryaml', '_output.yaml')
rmarkdown::render('slides.Rmd')
unlink('_output.yaml')

Seems to be working well enough. If anyone's got a better idea, let me know!