Source RMarkdown chunks

Question

Please consider the following.

For me, the beauty of writing nearly all analyses in a RMarkdown file instead of in R scripts it that RMarkdown offers the possibility to write a report of the analysis while performing/coding it.

Sometimes, specific code snippets are re-used for different outputs. For example: a table created in a RMarkdown code chunk could be used in a Shiny app as well. Currently, I copy/paste the respective code from the RMarkdown into the Shiny app code.

However, when this table would be created in a R script, we can use source("table_script.R"). In this way no copy/paste is needed and both the RMarkdown and the Shiny app can make efficient use of this table. However, this (writing separate source-able R scripts) is exactly what I try to avoid when writing an RMarkdown, because otherwise the code chunks in the RMarkdown would have little other use than sourcing a couple of R scripts.

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Question

Is there any way to source() (named) RMarkdown chunks?

Thanks in advance!