Exporting R tables to HTML

Question

Is there a way to easily export R tables to a simple HTML page?

Answer 1

The xtable function in the xtable package can export R tables to HTML tables. This blog entry describes how you can create HTML pages from Sweave documents.

Answer 2

It might be worth mentioning that there has been a new package specifically designed to convert (and style with css) data.frames (or tables) into HTML tables in an easy and intuitive way. It is called tableHTML. You can see a simple example below:

library(tableHTML)
#create an html table 
tableHTML(mtcars)

#and to export in a file
write_tableHTML(tableHTML(mtcars), file = 'myfile.html')

You can see a detailed tutorial here as well.

Answer 3

Apart from xtable mentioned by @nullglob there are three more packages that might come handy here:

• R2HTML
• HTMLUtils
• hwriter

Answer 4

The grammar of tables package gt is also an option.

Here's the example from the docs for generating a HTML table:

library(gt)

tab_html <-
  gtcars %>%
  dplyr::select(mfr, model, msrp) %>%
  dplyr::slice(1:5) %>%
  gt() %>%
  tab_header(
    title = md("Data listing from **gtcars**"),
    subtitle = md("`gtcars` is an R dataset")
  ) %>%
  as_raw_html()

Answer 5

In an issue for the DT package, someone posted how to use the DT package to get html in tables. I've pasted the relevant example code, modifying it to reference all columns with: targets = "_all".

library(DT)

render <- c(
  "function(data, type, row){",
  "  if(type === 'sort'){",
  "    var parser = new DOMParser();",
  "    var doc = parser.parseFromString(data, 'text/html');",
  "    data = doc.querySelector('a').innerText;",
  "  }",
  "  return data;",
  "}"
)

dat <- data.frame(
  a = c("AAA", "BBB", "CCC"), 
  b = c(
    '<a href="#" id = "Z" onclick = "Ztest">aaaaa</a>', 
    '<a href="#" id = "A" onclick = "Atest">bbbbb</a>',
    '<a href="#" id = "J" onclick = "Jtest">jjjjj</a>'
  )
)

datatable(
  dat, 
  escape = FALSE,
  options = list(
    columnDefs = list(
      list(targets = "_all", render = JS(render))
    )
  )
)

I hope this helps.