Little useless-useful R functions – Transforming dataframe to markdown table

Writing markdown documents outside RStudio (using the usual set of packages) has benefits and struggles. Huge struggle is transforming dataframe results into markdown table, using hypens and pipes. Ugghhh…

This useless functions takes R dataframe as input and prints out dataframe wrapped in markdown table.

iris[1:3,1:5]
# Result:
#> Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
#> 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
#> 2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
#> 3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa

And if we want this result in Markdown, it should look like:

 |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|

This can be directly used in any editor. (Sidenote: if you decide to use Latex, same function can be created, just different ASCII chars needs to be used – ampersend and backslash).

The super lazy function

df_2_MD <- function(your_df){
  cn <- as.character(names(your_df))
  headr <- paste0(c("", cn),  sep = "|", collapse='')
  sepr <- paste0(c('|', rep(paste0(c(rep('-',3), "|"), collapse=''),length(cn))), collapse ='')
  st <- "|"
    for (i in 1:nrow(your_df)){
      for(j in 1:ncol(your_df)){
        if (j%%ncol(your_df) == 0) {
          st <- paste0(st, as.character(your_df[i,j]), "|", "\n", "" , "|", collapse = '')
        } else {
        st <- paste0(st, as.character(your_df[i,j]), "|", collapse = '')
        }
      }
    }
  fin <- paste0(c(headr, sepr, substr(st,1,nchar(st)-1)), collapse="\n")
  cat(fin)
}  


# run function
short_iris <- iris[1:3,1:5]
df_2_MD(short_iris)

As always, code is available on Github in  Useless_R_function repository. The sample file in this repository is here (filename: Dataframe_to_markdown.R) Check the repository for future updates.

Happy R-coding and stay healthy!