R - Markdown avoiding package loading messages

Question

I have been using Knitr via R-Studio, and think it is pretty neat. I have a minor issue though. When I source a file in an R-Chunk, the knitr output includes external comments as follows:

+ FALSE Loading required package: ggplot2
+ FALSE Loading required package: gridExtra
+ FALSE Loading required package: grid
+ FALSE Loading required package: VGAM
+ FALSE Loading required package: splines
+ FALSE Loading required package: stats4
+ FALSE Attaching package: 'VGAM'
+ FALSE The following object(s) are masked from 'package:stats4':

I have tried to set R-chunk options in various ways but still didn't seem to avoid the problem:

```{r echo=FALSE, cache=FALSE, results=FALSE, warning=FALSE, comment=FALSE, warning=FALSE} 
source("C:/Rscripts/source.R");

```

Is there any way to comment out these messages?

Answer 1

You can use include=FALSE to exclude everything in a chunk.

```{r include=FALSE}
source("C:/Rscripts/source.R")
```

If you only want to suppress messages, use message=FALSE instead:

```{r message=FALSE}
source("C:/Rscripts/source.R")
```

Answer 2

```{r results='hide', message=FALSE, warning=FALSE}
library(RJSONIO)
library(AnotherPackage)
```

see Chunk Options in the Knitr docs

Answer 3

My best solution on R Markdown was to create a code chunk only to load libraries and exclude everything in the chunk.

{r results='asis', echo=FALSE, include=FALSE,}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE, warning=FALSE)
#formating tables
library(xtable)

#data wrangling
library(dplyr)

#text processing
library(stringi)

Answer 4

This is an old question, but here's another way to do it.

You can modify the R code itself instead of the chunk options, by wrapping the source call in suppressPackageStartupMessages(), suppressMessages(), and/or suppressWarnings(). E.g:

```{r echo=FALSE}
suppressWarnings(suppressMessages(suppressPackageStartupMessages({
source("C:/Rscripts/source.R")
})
```

You can also put those functions around your library() calls inside the "source.R" script.