Blogging with runnable Python in Rmarkdown files

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• August 21, 2018
• python  
• R  
• blogging  
• R markdown  

I wondered if I could blog with runnable Python code chunks if I’m creating my Hugo content with .Rmarkdown files. It looks like I can with the reticulate package; see the vignette here.

install.packages('reticulate', repos="https://cloud.r-project.org")
library(reticulate)

I believe this allows you to actually run Python. Alternatively, if you just want to display Python code, just use a code fence, i.e. the Github-style code block that’s 3 backticks, new line, code, then three closing backticks on a new line, like so:

x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
print(x[0:4])

According to the reticulate vignette, you start by loading the package and specifying the python directory.

library(reticulate)
use_python("/usr/bin/python")

Ultimately though I could not get the following simple Python code to execute:

import pandas

This may be an issue of me not having pandas installed properly. Answering that question will have to wait until a later date.