What is "knitr"

knitr is an engine for dynamic report generation with R. It is a package in the statistical programming language R that enables integration of R code into LaTeX, LyX, HTML, Markdown, AsciiDoc, and reStructuredText documents. The purpose of knitr is to allow reproducible research in R through the means of Literate Programming. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

knitr was inspired by Sweave and written with a different design for better modularization, so it is easier to maintain and extend. Sweave can be regarded as a subset of knitr in the sense that all features of Sweave are also available in knitr. Some of knitr extensions include the R Markdown format (used in reports published on RPubs), caching, TikZ graphics and support to other languages such as Python, Perl, C++, Shell scripts and CoffeeScript, and so on.

knitr is officially supported in the RStudio IDE for R, LyX, Emacs/ESS and the Architect IDE for data science.