Is it possible to view an HTML table in the viewer pane?

I have this functionality in my htmlTable package and the function is rather simple:

print.htmlTable<- function(x, useViewer = TRUE, ...){
  # Don't use viewer if in knitr
  if (useViewer &&
        !"package:knitr" %in% search()){

    htmlFile <- tempfile(fileext=".html")
    htmlPage <- paste("<html>",
                      "<head>",
                      "<meta http-equiv=\"Content-type\" content=\"text/html;charset=UTF-8\">",
                      "</head>",
                      "<body>",
                      "<div style=\"margin: 0 auto; display: table; margin-top: 1em;\">",
                      x,
                      "</div>",
                      "</body>",
                      "</html>", sep="\n")
    cat(htmlPage, file=htmlFile)

    viewer <- getOption("viewer")
    if (!is.null(viewer) &&
          is.function(viewer)){
      # (code to write some content to the file)
      viewer(htmlFile)
    }else{
      utils::browseURL(htmlFile)
    }
  }else{
    cat(x)
  }
}

RStudio recommends that you use the getOption("viewer") instead of @Ramnath's suggestion, the raw RStudio::viewer(). My solution also adds the utils::browserURL() in case you are not using RStudio. I got the idea from this blog post.


I have a solution that works for kable tables.

kable(iris) %>% kableExtra::kable_styling()

This is automatically displayed in the viewer pane. No need for tempfile.

Tags:

R

Rstudio

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