Extract only text from Rmd documents

Question

Not even sure if this is possible, but is there a way to extract only the raw text portion of the .Rmd file and discard any code? Or basically converting an .Rmd file into

Answer 1

You can knit document without evaluating and including code.

Here's an example of dummy document foo.Rmd:

# Header 1

foo

## Header 2

bar

## Header 22

foobar

```{r}
1
```

text text text

```{r}
print(2)
```

We can knit this document using knitr::knit("foo.Rmd"), but in this case code chunks will be included in text. To deal with this we need to set knitr options:

library(knitr)
opts_chunk$set(list(echo = FALSE, eval = FALSE))
knit("foo.Rmd")

This command will create output document foo.md only with text.