How can I output just the code from a quarto document as a .R File

[ChandlerLutz]

Description

I have a standard quarto .qmd file. I would like to output the code to a .R file.

• Is it possible to do this?

• If I wanted to output the code from a python file to a .py file, would the process be any different?

[mcanouil]

See knitr::purl (https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/purl.html).

[cderv]

@ChandlerLutz To be complete regarding your question:

purl() support for .qmd file requires knitr 1.42 for correct support

And this will only allow to create .R file from a .qmd cell content.

If I wanted to output the code from a python file to a .py file, would the process be any different?

Yes it would. You would probably need to leverage Jupyter CLI to convert to a python py script.

So overall, Quarto does not have feature to convert to a script. Though in 1.4 pre-release, there is support for creating output from `.py
https://quarto.org/docs/prerelease/1.4/script.html

.R support coming soon

[allefeld]

For Jupyter-based qmd files, there's also (now?) the approach to use

quarto convert document.qmd    # → document.ipynb

and then

jupyter nbconvert --to python document.ipynb    # → document.py

if the language is Python, or

jupyter nbconvert --to script document.ipynb    # → document.txt

otherwise. However, the output from --to script is pretty barebones, it doesn't include metadata or Markdown cells.

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Many more languages are supported by jupytext; it can read ipynb files but also directly qmd files. For example

jupytext --to jl document.qmd    # → document.jl

for a Julia-based document.

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Finally, it's pretty easy to process an ipynb file (generated by quarto convert) from any language which supports reading JSON, with the advantage that detailed customization is possible. I've done that for Matlab.