How to include hyperlinks in a table in a Sweave document?

Question

I have a data frame containing hyperlinks that I would like to present as interactive links using Sweave . I know about xtable , but I don’t know how to use it to process the contents of a data frame as a LaTeX command.

Answer 1

One strategy is to use sanitize.text.function from the print function in xtable . Setting sanitize.text.function = function(x){x} causes print simply echo the contents of the contents of the data frame for later interpretation of LaTeX:

 \documentclass{article} \usepackage{hyperref} \begin{document} \title{Example of how to include hyperlinks in Sweave with \texttt{xtable}} \author{David R. Lovell} \maketitle <<load-packages, include=FALSE>>= require(xtable) @ <<read-data, tidy=FALSE>>= hits <- read.table(textConnection( "Count,Link,Title 1031,http://australianbioinformatics.net/jobs,Jobs 796,http://australianbioinformatics.net/,Home"), stringsAsFactors=FALSE, sep=",", header=TRUE) @ <<print-xtable, echo = FALSE, results = 'asis'>>= print( xtable( hits, align="rrll", caption="Top content on \\href{http://australianbioinformatics.net}{AustralianBioinformatics.net} in May 2014." ), include.rownames=FALSE ) @ <<print-xtable-href, echo = FALSE, results = 'asis'>>= linkedHits <- transform(hits, href=paste("\\href{", Link, "}{", Title, "}", sep="")) print( xtable( subset(linkedHits, select=c(Count, href)), align="rrl", caption="Top content on \\href{http://australianbioinformatics.net}{AustralianBioinformatics.net} in May 2014, now with added hyperlinks." ), include.rownames=FALSE, sanitize.text.function = function(x){x} ) @ \end{document} 

... which produces this output in PDF format: