YAML current date in rmarkdown

📗 | YAML current date in rmarkdown

Are you tired of manually updating the date in your rmarkdown documents? 📅

Do you want to automate the process and save time? ⏰

Well, you're in luck! In this blog post, I will show you an easy solution to include the current date in the YAML front-matter of your .rmd documents in the popular knitr and rmarkdown packages. Let's dive in! 💻🤩

The Problem 😟

You used to have a line of code in your wiki pages that displayed the current date. It looked something like this:

_baptiste, `r format(Sys.time(), "%d %B, %Y")`_

This would convert to "baptiste, 03 May, 2014" in the HTML output. However, when you tried using the same code in the YAML header of your rmarkdown document, you encountered an error. 😓

The Solution 💡

To include the current date in the YAML front-matter, we need to use a different approach. Instead of using inline code, we will edit the YAML header to achieve the desired result.

Here's the modified YAML header code:

title: "Sample Document"
output:
  html_document:
    toc: true
    theme: united
date: !!timestamp "`r format(Sys.time(), '%Y-%m-%d')`"
author: baptiste

You'll notice that we are using the !!timestamp tag to indicate that the input is a timestamp value. The backticks allow us to execute the R code and format the current date using the format function. The format we used in this example is "%Y-%m-%d", which gives us a date like "2022-01-01".

The Call-to-Action 🚀

Try implementing this solution in your rmarkdown documents to automatically display the current date. Say goodbye to manually updating dates and hello to efficiency! ⚡️

Let me know in the comments below if you found this solution helpful or if you have any additional questions. I'd love to hear from you! 💬👇

Happy coding! 💻✨