Using R and Python in Quarto

There are two ways of using Quarto:

The first is that it’s just a tool to just convert Jupyter notebooks into websites. The websites are great, it’s a delight, etc etc.

The other way of using Quarto is to move beyond Jupyter notebooks into a new format called Quarto Markdown files, or .qmd. Quarto Markdown is a plaintext-only alternative to Jupyter, and built off of R Markdown (which I don’t really know but hey, it’s what R people use!).

What Quarto markdown looks like

To use a language like Python or R, you wrap you code in triple backticks and add either {python} or {r} to it.

This is some Python code.

```{python}
import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv("temperatures.csv")
df.head()
```

Here is some R code.

```{r}
data <- read.csv("temperatures.csv")
print(data)
```

Traditional Markdown just runs the code as styled code blocks, but Quarto Markdown actually runs the code, similar to a Jupyter notebook.

Quarto markdown in action

This is a live example of using the pandas libary to read in a CSV file, then display the first few lines of the file. You’ll see both the code as well as the output.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv("temperatures.csv")
df.head(3)

	Date	Anomaly
0	1880-01-01	-0.30
1	1880-02-01	-0.21
2	1880-03-01	-0.18

To make this happen, all I had to do was add this Markdown:

```{python}
import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv("temperatures.csv")
df.head(3)
```

Amazing!