How can I turn an R data frame into a simple, unstyled html table?

Question

Let's say I have a data frame in R. I'd like to write it to a file as a simple HTML table. Just the <table>, <tr>, and <td> tags.

So far this seems harder than it should be. Right now I'm trying to use R2THML like so:

HTML(dataframe, file=outpath, append=FALSE)

But then I get a ugly, html-styled file that might look like so:

<table cellspacing=0 border=1>
<caption align=bottom class=captiondataframe></caption>
<tr><td>
    <table border=0 class=dataframe>
    <tbody> 
    <tr class= firstline > 
        <th>&nbsp;  </th>
        <th>name  </th>
        <th>donations  </th>
        <th>clicks  </th>
            ...
    </tr> 
<tr> 
<td class=firstcolumn>1
</td>
<td class=cellinside>Black.text
</td>
...
</tbody>
</table>
 </td></table>
 <br>

Is there a way to get output that's simpler (without specifying border, headings, captions, etc. Without outputting a table inside another table)? Or is this as good as it gets?

Answer 1

The xtable package can generate HTML output as well as LaTeX output.

# install.packages("xtable")
library("xtable")
sample_table <- mtcars[1:3,1:3]
print(xtable(sample_table), type="html", file="example.html")

gives, in the file example.html:

<!-- html table generated in R 3.0.1 by xtable 1.7-1 package -->
<!-- Fri Jul 19 09:08:15 2013 -->
<TABLE border=1>
<TR> <TH>  </TH> <TH> mpg </TH> <TH> cyl </TH> <TH> disp </TH>  </TR>
  <TR> <TD align="right"> Mazda RX4 </TD> <TD align="right"> 21.00 </TD> <TD align="right"> 6.00 </TD> <TD align="right"> 160.00 </TD> </TR>
  <TR> <TD align="right"> Mazda RX4 Wag </TD> <TD align="right"> 21.00 </TD> <TD align="right"> 6.00 </TD> <TD align="right"> 160.00 </TD> </TR>
  <TR> <TD align="right"> Datsun 710 </TD> <TD align="right"> 22.80 </TD> <TD align="right"> 4.00 </TD> <TD align="right"> 108.00 </TD> </TR>
   </TABLE>

This could be further simplified with more options to xtable and print.xtable:

print(xtable(sample_table, align="llll"), 
      type="html", html.table.attributes="")

gives

<!-- html table generated in R 3.0.1 by xtable 1.7-1 package -->
<!-- Fri Jul 19 09:13:33 2013 -->
<TABLE >
<TR> <TH>  </TH> <TH> mpg </TH> <TH> cyl </TH> <TH> disp </TH>  </TR>
  <TR> <TD> Mazda RX4 </TD> <TD> 21.00 </TD> <TD> 6.00 </TD> <TD> 160.00 </TD> </TR>
  <TR> <TD> Mazda RX4 Wag </TD> <TD> 21.00 </TD> <TD> 6.00 </TD> <TD> 160.00 </TD> </TR>
  <TR> <TD> Datsun 710 </TD> <TD> 22.80 </TD> <TD> 4.00 </TD> <TD> 108.00 </TD> </TR>
   </TABLE>

(which could be directed to a file with the file argument to print.xtable as in the previous example.)

Answer 2

A prettier but slower option:

library(htmlTable)
htmlTable(iris)