Re: [O] convert rmarkdown (rmd) files to orgmode?

[Charles C. Berry]

On Wed, 20 Jul 2016, Xebar Saram wrote:

> Hi again
>
> Chuck:
>
> is there a way to modify you nice code regex code snippet to simultaneously
> change all example blocks to R blocks in a converted rmd>org file?
> so when executing the block all example blocks:
>
>
> #+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
>     help.search("rnorm")
> #+END_EXAMPLE
>
> will turn into R blocks
>
> #+BEGIN_SRC R :session Rorg  :results none
>     help.search("rnorm")
> #+END_SRC

The obvious thing is to do this with two additional `replace' operations.

Interactively, you can use `replace-string' to do this, since those are 
fixed strings and there are no backreferences to worry about. I think 
there is a dired-mode incantation that would allow you to do this on all 
files in a directory if you wanted.

But see the docstring for 'replace-string' which shows a better 
incantation for programmatically doing the changes.

IMO, you would be better served by doiing this in a scripting language 
like bash or python, but even R could do it.

One reason for using a scripting language is that unless you are a wiz at 
elisp, it is easier to report back the changes that are made in context; 
if you convert something that truly *is* an example block, you want to 
know about it so you can back out that change. Also, it is possible that 
the R code in the file you are converting will contain characters that 
will foil the regexp matching and you really need to catch those.

I'd be tempted to do it in R - at least in part - so I could parse() the 
result to check that it is valid code. The ESS suite has some parsing 
capabilities, but if you do not already know them using R will be a lot 
easier. An example block that does not produce valid code might be 
something you should leave as an example block.

Write a script that does all the conversion including the pandoc 
bit. Then run that at the command line.

Chuck