reprex

CRAN_Status_Badge R-CMD-check Codecov test coverage

Overview

Prepare reprexes for posting to GitHub issues, StackOverflow, in Slack messages or snippets, or even to paste into PowerPoint or Keynote slides. What is a reprex? It’s a reproducible example, as coined by Romain Francois.

Given R code on the clipboard, selected in RStudio, as an expression (quoted or not), or in a file …

Get resulting runnable code + output as

The result is returned invisibly, written to a file and, if possible, placed on the clipboard. Preview an HTML version in RStudio viewer or default browser.

Installation

Install from CRAN:

install.packages("reprex")

or get a development version from GitHub:

devtools::install_github("tidyverse/reprex")

On Linux, you probably want to install xclip or xsel, so reprex can access the X11 clipboard. This is ‘nice to have’, but not mandatory. The usual sudo apt-get install or sudo yum install installation methods should work for both xclip and xsel.

Usage

Let’s say you copy this code onto your clipboard (or, on RStudio Server or Cloud, select it):

(y <- 1:4)
mean(y)

Then call reprex(), where the default target venue is GitHub:

reprex()

A nicely rendered HTML preview will display in RStudio’s Viewer (if you’re in RStudio) or your default browser otherwise.

The relevant bit of GitHub-flavored Markdown is ready to be pasted from your clipboard (on RStudio Server or Cloud, you will need to copy this yourself):

``` r
(y <- 1:4)
#> [1] 1 2 3 4
mean(y)
#> [1] 2.5
```

Here’s what that Markdown would look like rendered in a GitHub issue:

(y <- 1:4)
#> [1] 1 2 3 4
mean(y)
#> [1] 2.5

Anyone else can copy, paste, and run this immediately.

In addition to GitHub, this Markdown also works on Stack Overflow and Discourse. Those venues can be formally requested via venue = "so" and venue = "ds", but they are just aliases for venue = "gh".

Instead of reading from the clipboard, you can:

But wait, there’s more!