ways to download the atable output and how to use it on shiny

[dingying85]

Dear Developper,

I find atable very helpful and is there a way to export the output of the atable function to an html file and is there a way to link it on R shiny? Thanks.

Yours,
Ying

[arminstroebel]

Dear Ying,

I am not familiar with R shiny, so take my advice with caution:

According to
https://shiny.rstudio.com/articles/render-table.html
you can use shiny::renderTable() for this. renderTable() can take a data.frame as input, so you can pass atable(... , format_to=Console) to it. Also shiny::tableOutput() may help.

Perhaps you can also experiment with atable(... , format_to="HTML")

Regards Armin

[aghaynes]

You need to format_to = "console"... non-breaking spaces are not formatted correctly with html or the default (nor md).

library(shiny)
library(atable)


ui <- fluidPage(
    # Application title
    titlePanel("atable"),
    tableOutput("table")    
)

server <- function(input, output) {
    output$table <- renderTable({
        data(mtcars)
        atable(mpg + hp + disp ~ cyl, mtcars, format_to = "console")
    })
}

# Run the application 
shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

[aghaynes]

I was playing around with officer and flextable yesterday to get tables into a word file, but flextable can also create HTML output. Maybe that is another way to go...

[arminstroebel]

Spaces are a problem, especially whitespace. Most of them are ignored, some of them have a meaning. Using them for indentation is not intended.

I found some information here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46766411/whitespace-in-r-shiny

Below is a modification of Alan's code above, that does some alignment.
Thats really dirty, but shows a possible solution for the alignment.

I replace the indent character ' ' (four spaces) with intToUtf8(160). And thats is rendered as a whitespace and not ignored by html.

(I entered four whitespace above, but they also got eaten by html)

Depending on the context, whtiespace is interpreted differently. Latex also ignores them, in Word they are ok, HTML is also different. I do not know all possible contexts.

I should make that indent_character directly modifiably in atable() and atable_options() . Next version...

library(shiny)
library(atable)
library(stringi)

ui <- fluidPage(
    # Application title
    titlePanel("atable"),
    tableOutput("table")
)

server <- function(input, output) {
  output$table <- renderTable({
    data(mtcars)
    a = atable(mpg + hp + disp ~ cyl, mtcars, format_to = "Console")
    a$Group = gsub(pattern="    ",
                   replacement = stringi::stri_dup(intToUtf8(160), 6),
                   x=a$Group,
                   fixed=TRUE)
    a
  }, type="html")
}

# Run the application
shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)

[arminstroebel]

Version 1.9 of atable is up on CRAN. In this Version the indent_character is now modifyable as an argument and via atable_options.

The following code uses whitespace (intToUtf8(160)) as indent_character, which gets rendered as expected in shiny:

library(shiny)
library(atable)


ui <- fluidPage(
    # Application title
    titlePanel("atable"),
    tableOutput("table")
)

server <- function(input, output) {
  output$table <- renderTable({
    data(mtcars)
    atable(mpg + hp + disp ~ cyl,
           mtcars,
           indent_character = paste0(rep(intToUtf8(160), 6), collapse = ""),
           format_to="Console")


  }, type="html")
}

# Run the application
shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)