Programmatically creating Markdown tables in R with KnitR

Question

I am just starting to learn about KnitR and the use of Markdown in generating R documents and reports. This looks to be perfect for a lot of the day to day reporting that I

Answer 1

It is not very hard to make your own customized function. Here is a very simple proof of concept to generate an rmarkdown table of a data.frame:

   rmarkdownTable <- function(df){
      cat(paste(names(df), collapse = "|"))
      cat("\n")
      cat(paste(rep("-", ncol(df)), collapse = "|"))
      cat("\n")

      for(i in 1:nrow(df)){
        cat(paste(df[i,], collapse = "|"))
        cat("\n")
        }
    invisible(NULL)
    }

In .Rmd document you would then use the function with results = 'asis':

```{r, results = 'asis'}
rmarkdownTable <- function(df){
  cat(paste(names(df), collapse = "|"))
  cat("\n")
  cat(paste(rep("-", ncol(df)), collapse = "|"))
  cat("\n")

  for(i in 1:nrow(df)){
    cat(paste(df[i,], collapse = "|"))
    cat("\n")
    }
invisible(NULL)
}

rmarkdownTable(head(iris))
```

The code above would give you the following figure (in the example this is the pdf output, but since the table is in markdwon, you could knit into html or word too).

From here - and reading other people´s code - you can figure out how to manipulate the text to generate the table you want and create more personalized functions.