knitr Rmd to md and the YAML header

Question

I use knitr to render md from Rmd. The YAML header :output is not changed in that process. Is that inteded? After all the output of the md file is not md anymore.

As an example (please excuse the bad formatting -- I do not know how to make that work properly)

---
output:
  md_document:
    variant: markdown_github
---

# Test Document

This is a test document.

is rendered with knit(test.Rmd) into

---
output:
  md_document:
    variant: markdown_github
---

# Test Document

This is a test document.

Do I miss anything?

Answer 1

knitr doesn't care about the header, you probably mean to use rmarkdown::render