A more concise way to add hyperlinks to Rmd files

[joepowers16]

I can add a hyperlink to an Rmd report in the following fashion [text](https://here.is.my.superlong.link/G01HPJFLS1W/p1608076284001900).

This will appear fine in the knitted report, but it can really clutter up the Rmarkdown report which is where I spend the bulk of my time. Is there a way to create hyperlinks using a reference? e.g., [text](link1) and then have the value for link1 at the bottom of the file?

link1: https://here.is.my.superlong.link/G01HPJFLS1W/p1608076284001900

[cderv]

Hi @joepowers16,

Not a direct answer to your specific question but you could be interesting in the new visual markdown editor included in RStudio 1.4 (currently in Preview)

RStudio v1.4 Preview: Visual Markdown Editing

Only the text of the link would be shown.

I would be interested to know if you find it useful for your usage! Hope so.

Regarding coding solution, that is hack-ish but you could rely on R with the Rmd format compare to only md format. Custom solution that you may found (or not) useful

---
title: 'insert link helper'
output: html_document
---

```{r links-db, include = FALSE}
md_link <- function(text, link) {
  sprintf("[%s](%s)", text, link)
}
links <- c("https://here.is.my.superlong.link/G01HPJFLS1W/p1608076284001900", 
           "https://here.is.my.other.superlong.link/G01HPJFLS1W/p1608076284001900")
```

See `r md_link("text", links[1])`