Custom knitr language engines

Glue provides a few custom language engines for knitr, which allows you to use glue directly in knitr chunks.

glue engine

The first engine is the glue engine, which evaluates the chunk contents as a glue template.

1 + 1 = {1 + 1}

## 1 + 1 = 2

Maybe the most useful use of the glue engine is to set the knitr option results = 'asis' and output markdown or HTML directly into the document.

```{glue, results = 'asis', echo = FALSE}
#### mtcars has **{nrow(mtcars)} rows** and _{ncol(mtcars)} columns_.
```

mtcars has 32 rows and 11 columns.

If you want to pass additional arguments into the glue call, simply include them as chunk options.

```{glue, .open = "<<", .close = ">>", results = 'asis', echo = FALSE}
The **median waiting time** between eruptions is <<median(faithful$waiting)>>.
```

The median waiting time between eruptions is 76.

glue_sql engine

The second engine is glue_sql, which will use glue::glue_sql() to generate a SQL query and then run the query using the sql engine.

First we create a new connection to an in-memory SQLite database, and write a new table to it.

con <- DBI::dbConnect(RSQLite::SQLite(), ":memory:")
mtcars$model <- rownames(mtcars)
DBI::dbWriteTable(con, "mtcars", mtcars)

Next define some variables we that we can use with glue to interpolate.

var <- "mpg"
tbl <- "mtcars"
num <- 150

Then we can use glue_sql to construct and run a query using those variables into that database. Note you need to provide the connection object as a connection chunk option.

In this example there are two type of quotes. The first is a bare backtick, these are passed directly to the SQL engine unchanged. The second is backticks inside of braces, which are specially interpreted to do the proper quoting for the given SQL engine by glue. In this example we use the sqlite engine, which uses backticks for quoting, but you would use the same backticks inside brace syntax for postgreSQL, and glue_sql() would automatically use double quotes for quoting instead.

```{glue_sql, connection = con}
SELECT `model`, `hp`, {`var`}
FROM {`tbl`}
WHERE {`tbl`}.`hp` > {num}
```

SELECT `model`, `hp`, `mpg`
FROM `mtcars`
WHERE `mtcars`.`hp` > 150

Displaying records 1 - 10

model	hp	mpg
Hornet Sportabout	175	18.7
Duster 360	245	14.3
Merc 450SE	180	16.4
Merc 450SL	180	17.3
Merc 450SLC	180	15.2
Cadillac Fleetwood	205	10.4
Lincoln Continental	215	10.4
Chrysler Imperial	230	14.7
Camaro Z28	245	13.3
Pontiac Firebird	175	19.2