texttable

This package imports tabular data that is stored in a variety of text formats. It uses Pandoc to convert various formats to HTML and then imports them via rvest::html_table.

Install

devtools::install_github('noamross/texttable')

Note that testtable requires the latest pandoc, which can be downloaded here. To install via the command line:

Linux:

wget https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/download/1.17.0.2/pandoc-1.17.0.2-1-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i pandoc-1.17.0.2-1-amd64.deb

OSX (Homebrew):

brew install pandoc

Windows:

????

Usage

Enter tabular in the text format of your choice:

library(texttable)
sample_table = "
                | My | Tabular  | Data |
                |----|----------|------|
                |   1| Sample 1 | 0.3  |
                |   2| Sample 2 | 1.2  |
               "
imported = texttable(sample_table)
imported
#> [[1]]
#>   My  Tabular Data
#> 1  1 Sample 1  0.3
#> 2  2 Sample 2  1.2

Note that texttable() will trim leading whitespace from character inputs by default.

Get tables out of text files, and even MS Word files:

tables = texttable('tests/testthat/tables.markdown')
tables[[1]]
#>   Right Left Center Default
#> 1    12   12     12      12
#> 2   123  123    123     123
#> 3     1    1      1       1
word_tables = texttable('tests/testthat/tables.docx')
word_tables[[1]]
#>             Name       Game      Fame             Blame
#> 1   Lebron James Basketball Very High Leaving Cleveland
#> 2     Ryan Braun   Baseball  Moderate          Steroids
#> 3 Russell Wilson   Football      High     Tacky uniform

Known issues

Pandoc conversion of tables from latex, haddock, odt, formats has known issues and does not always work. For these formats texttable will provide a warning, as the output quality is unknown and will change with your current version of Pandoc.