The hwriter Package: Composing HTML Documents with R Objects

Authors

• Gregoire Pau, EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute
• Wolfgang Huber, EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute

Date of this Version

6-2009

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (June 2009) 1(1)

Comments

Copyright 2009, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported

Abstract

HTML documents are structured documents made of diverse elements such as paragraphs, sections, columns, figures and tables organized in a hierarchical layout. Combination of HTML documents and hyperlinking is useful to report analysis results; for example, in the package array Quality Metrics (Kauffmannetal., 2009), estimating the quality of mi croarray data sets and cellHTS2(Boutrosetal.,2006), performing the analysis of cell-based screens.

There are several tools for exporting data from R into HTML documents. The package R2HTML is able to render a large diversity of R objects in HTML but does not easily support combining them in a structured layout and has a complex syntax. On the other hand, the package xtable can render R matrices with simple commands but cannot combine HTML elements and has limited formatting options.

The package hwriter allows rendering R objects in HTML and combining resulting elements in a structured layout. It uses a simple syntax, supports extensive formatting options and takes full advantage of the ellipsis ’...’ argument and R vector re cycling rules