Print a web page from within R

Question

I can open a web page from within R:

shell.exec("http://stackoverflow.com/")

But how can I then print this webpage, directly from within R, as an xps or pdf file?

Answer 1

You can invoke a command line tool called wkhtmltopdf, which is both open source and cross-platform:

shell("C:\\wkhtmltopdf\\bin\\wkhtmltopdf http://stackoverflow.com so.pdf")

Do not forget to escape backslashes!

Answer 2

I realise this is an old question, but you can use the webshot package to do this.

# install.packages("webshot")

library(webshot)

webshot("https://stackoverflow.com/", "stackoverflow.pdf")