Just before the 2022 Christmas, we finally fulfilled a knitr request from 2018 by Hugh Parsonage (thanks, Hugh). That is, remove the stringr dependency in knitr. The original motivation was to make it faster to install knitr, since stringr depends on stringi, which is a relatively heavy dependency and can take quite some time to compile. This motivation is no longer that strong because it has become easier to install prebuilt binaries of …