shiny.tag -> character -> shiny.tag

[davisderodes]

Hi!

I was wondering if it were possible to take an object of class shiny.tag, convert it to a string and then convert it back to a shiny.tag.

In other words if there's some_function that can do the following:

vbox <- flexdashboard::valueBox("100", "Score")
vbox_txt <- as.character(vbox)
vbox_new <- some_function(vbox_txt)
identical(vbox, vbox_new) == T

Thanks!

[nirgrahamuk]

I expect you will struggle to find an easy solution for that.
Do you have a use case, or issue in your work, that may be solved differently perhaps ? we could discuss it.

[davisderodes]

The goal is to have various shiny elements sent through an API and then rendered in a Flexdashboard .Rmd.

Any solution would work, but would preferably like for it to be flexible (which sounds like there isn't an easy solution).

[nirgrahamuk]

Maybe my reaction was too kneejerk.
In general we can take an r_object, and get a string representation, then evaluate it back into an r object with the use of dput() to go to string, and eval/parse to go back. The exceptions would be objects with pointers etc.
consider

vbox <- flexdashboard::valueBox("100", "Score")
vbox_txt <- capture.output(dput(vbox))
vbox_new <- eval(parse(text=vbox_txt))
identical(vbox, vbox_new)

[davisderodes]

I think this is what I was looking for! Thank you so much.