Returns a sequence of DT::datatables in a list of knitted HTML documents

Question

I have a function that returns a series of tables. I want to return them all as DT::datatable. However, I cannot get R to return these tables when they are in a list. They appear in RMarkdown files but not in knitted HTML files. Is it possible to have a table appear in an HTML document?

---
title: "Untitled"
output: html_document
---

knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
library(tidyverse)

myfunc <- function(dataset){
  
  return_list <- list()
  
  mytab <- DT::datatable(dataset)
  
  return_list$mytab <- mytab
  
  return(return_list)
}

myfunc(mtcars)

---

The table appears in the RMarkdown file:

but will not appear in knitted HTML files:

Answer 1

There are two ways to do this:

If you know the key in advance, just call it with the key

myfunc(mtcars)$mytab

If you plan to make a longer list and want to print all tables in the list, use tagList from {htmltools}

htmltools::tagList(myfunc(mtcars))