htmlTable should return an error if nrows=0

[jkgrain]

I was running a report that accidentally tried to pass a dataframe with zero rows to htmlTable(). That generated the following error: Error in css.cell[row_nr, ] : subscript out of bounds.

I added error trapping to my code, but you should consider seq_along instead of for (nr in 1:nrow(x)).

thanks for a great package.

[gforge]

I prefer the shorter 1:nrow(x) solution and I think the correct thing for the package to do one of the two:

• Throw an error since a zero-row input isn't printeable
• Return a string that contains a zero-row message

The error seems to be more in line with the general behaviour but I can see the frustration when accidentally knitting and everything crashes because of an unexpected zero-row result.

[raredd]

Since cars[0, ] isn't an error, could you have a simple check for 0 rows?

htmlTable(cars[0, ]) ## error
htmlTable(cars[0, ][NA, ]) ## no error

In the second the table structure (with no data) is printed as one might expect. The user can visually inspect the tables.

This would be similar to option 2

[lemna]

I'd prefer to have a warning at most, and an empty table (with caption, header, footer, etc.) if there are zero rows. This comes in handy when generating listings for clinical trials.