[Feature request] Add an option to html_table() not to apply utils::type.convert()

[yutannihilation]

There seems no option to prevent html_table() from converting integer-ish texts to integers. For example, consider the case below. I want to parse 001 and 002 as "001" and "002", but actually they are interpreted integer 1 and 2. I think html_table() should provide some option to control this behavior.

It will probably be straight to implement to wrap the type.covert() line with if. If this sounds good, I'm happy to contribute a pull request.

library(rvest)
library(tibble)

d <- tibble(code = c("001", "002", "101", "102"),
            label = c("apple", "banana", "lemon", "orange"))

table_html <- knitr::kable(d, format = "html")
table_html <- as.character(table_html)

cat(table_html)
#> <table>
#>  <thead>
#>   <tr>
#>    <th style="text-align:left;"> code </th>
#>    <th style="text-align:left;"> label </th>
#>   </tr>
#>  </thead>
#> <tbody>
#>   <tr>
#>    <td style="text-align:left;"> 001 </td>
#>    <td style="text-align:left;"> apple </td>
#>   </tr>
#>   <tr>
#>    <td style="text-align:left;"> 002 </td>
#>    <td style="text-align:left;"> banana </td>
#>   </tr>
#>   <tr>
#>    <td style="text-align:left;"> 101 </td>
#>    <td style="text-align:left;"> lemon </td>
#>   </tr>
#>   <tr>
#>    <td style="text-align:left;"> 102 </td>
#>    <td style="text-align:left;"> orange </td>
#>   </tr>
#> </tbody>
#> </table>

table_html %>% 
  read_html() %>% 
  html_table()
#> [[1]]
#> # A tibble: 4 x 2
#>    code label 
#>   <int> <chr> 
#> 1     1 apple 
#> 2     2 banana
#> 3   101 lemon 
#> 4   102 orange

^{Created on 2021-02-05 by the reprex package (v1.0.0)}

rvest/R/table.R

Line 135 in 62cef0d

utils::type.convert(out[, i], as.is = TRUE, dec = dec, na.strings = na.strings)

[hadley]

I actually planned to do that, but forgot about it. A PR would be great 😄

[yutannihilation]

Oh, I see. Sure, I'll do a PR.