Retrieving values from an rhandsontable object (R, R shiny)

The question is 4 years old, but still relevant for the rhandsontable package users. Also, the solution provided by Lyx above no longer works. Following is an easy fix to the problem.

Every rhandsontable object is a deeply nested list. One of its elements is the data element, which itself is nested under the x element. However, the data is in json format, but it can easily be converted to a data.frame by using the fromJSON() function in the jsonlite package.

library(rhandsontable)
library(jsonlite)

hands_on_table <- rhandsontable(mtcars)
data_frame <- fromJSON(hands_on_table$x$data)
head(data_frame)

   mpg cyl disp  hp drat    wt  qsec vs am gear carb
1 21.0   6  160 110 3.90 2.620 16.46  0  1    4    4
2 21.0   6  160 110 3.90 2.875 17.02  0  1    4    4
3 22.8   4  108  93 3.85 2.320 18.61  1  1    4    1
4 21.4   6  258 110 3.08 3.215 19.44  1  0    3    1
5 18.7   8  360 175 3.15 3.440 17.02  0  0    3    2
6 18.1   6  225 105 2.76 3.460 20.22  1  0    3    1

Edit:

It is important to also mention that the main difference between using hot_to_r and jsonlite::fromJSON is that the former is used while the app is running and the latter only works in an interactive R session.