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Email dataframe as table in email body with SendMailR

Tags:

r

sendmailr

I am trying to send a dataframe with SendMailR. I can send it as an attachment with reasonably good formatting. However I would like to send the dataframe in the body of the email. I tried capture.output, print, sprintf but am not even able to get the format close.

e.g. I tried the following syntax

for (i in 1:nrow(df)){
 MSG = c(MSG,rownames(df)[1],as.character(unlist(df[i,])),'\n')
} 
MSG = sprintf('%-10s',MSG)
sendmail(from,to,subject,msg = list(MSG,attachment1,attachment2 ... ))

In other words, I am thinking that it might be necessary to convert my dataframe into a format with /n and sprintf('s-10%') etc and store it in MSG. Can someone point me in the right direction?

like image 223
hjw Avatar asked Feb 21 '14 08:02

hjw


3 Answers

As an alternative to sendmailR, here's an example using the gt package for converting the table to HTML and the blastula package for sending the email. Both packages are from RStudio: blastula and gt.

library(blastula)
library(gt)

tbl_html <- 
  mtcars %>% 
  gt() %>%
  as_raw_html()

email <-
  compose_email(
    body = blocks(tbl_html)
    )

email %>%
  smtp_send(
    to = '[email protected]',
    from = '[email protected]',
    subject = "Test email with table",
    credentials = creds_file("gmail_creds")
  )

To set the credentials the first time use (in this case using a gmail address):

create_smtp_creds_file(
  file = "gmail_creds",
  user = '[email protected]',
  provider = "gmail"
)

You can also use markdown in the body.

like image 180
sbha Avatar answered Oct 18 '22 16:10

sbha


Although sending HTML mails with sendmailR is not straighforward, but possible based on a mail discussion with the package author last year (thanks again to Olaf Mersmann for his kind help) - with simply overriding the Content-Type header. E.g.:

msg <- mime_part('<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0
Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
  <title>HTML demo</title>
  <style type="text/css">
  </style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>HTML demo</h1>
</body>
</html>')

## Override content type.
msg[["headers"]][["Content-Type"]] <- "text/html"

from    <- '<[email protected]>'
to      <- "<[email protected]>"
subject <- "HTML test"
body    <- list(msg)
sendmail(from, to, subject, body, ...)

On the other hand, there is no real need for HTML to present tables or a data.frame in a human-readable format. There is e.g. the ascii package or my pander pkg that can turn R objects to markdown. Quick demo:

> library(pander)
> panderOptions('table.split.table', Inf)
> pander(head(iris, 3))

-------------------------------------------------------------------
 Sepal.Length   Sepal.Width   Petal.Length   Petal.Width   Species 
-------------- ------------- -------------- ------------- ---------
     5.1            3.5           1.4            0.2       setosa  

     4.9             3            1.4            0.2       setosa  

     4.7            3.2           1.3            0.2       setosa  
-------------------------------------------------------------------

> pander(head(iris, 3), style = 'grid')


+----------------+---------------+----------------+---------------+-----------+
|  Sepal.Length  |  Sepal.Width  |  Petal.Length  |  Petal.Width  |  Species  |
+================+===============+================+===============+===========+
|      5.1       |      3.5      |      1.4       |      0.2      |  setosa   |
+----------------+---------------+----------------+---------------+-----------+
|      4.9       |       3       |      1.4       |      0.2      |  setosa   |
+----------------+---------------+----------------+---------------+-----------+
|      4.7       |      3.2      |      1.3       |      0.2      |  setosa   |
+----------------+---------------+----------------+---------------+-----------+

If you want to concatenate this to the e-mail body, use pander.return instead that returns character vector instead of writing to the console. And there are some other available table styles, also some useful panderOptions e.g. to set decimal mark, date format etc: http://rapporter.github.io/pander/

like image 44
daroczig Avatar answered Oct 18 '22 16:10

daroczig


library "xtable" will help to attach a data frame as table in email. Try this

   library(xtable)

   body=print(xtable(dataframe,caption = "Heading for the table"), type="html", caption.placement = "top")
like image 41
Amit Kumar Pradhan Avatar answered Oct 18 '22 14:10

Amit Kumar Pradhan