Get the previous commands as a text string in RStudio

previous_commands.R

# RStudio overrides `history()`, `loadhistory()` and `savehistory()`, 
# so they work somewhat differently than on the console version of R.
# This saves the current history to a temporary file then reads the last
# line of it (or more depending on the `n` argument)
#
# It does not handle multi-line commands, which would be more tricky to handle...
previous_commands <- function(n = 1) {
  tf <- tempfile()
  on.exit(unlink(tf))
  savehistory(tf)
  head(tail(readLines(tf), n = n + 1), n = n)
}