writing data frame to pdf table

Question

I have a data frame which I would like to write it to a pdf file in organized fashion.

For example, my df looks like this:

Date    County    Trade
1         


        

Answer 1

This code should work:

library(gridExtra)

df <- read.table(text = 
"1/1/2012  USA     5
1/1/2012  Japan   4
1/2/2012  USA     10
1/3/2012  Germany 15"
)
names(df) <- c("Date","Country","Trade")

EqDatedf <- as.data.frame(df[1,])
EmptyLine <- data.frame(Date = "",Country = "",Trade = "")

pdf(file = "q.pdf")

for (i in 2:nrow(df)) 
{
if (as.vector(df$Date[i])  ==  as.vector(df$Date[i-1])) 
{EqDatedf <- rbind(EqDatedf, df[i,])}

else {
EqDatedf <- rbind(EqDatedf, EmptyLine)
EqDatedf <- rbind(EqDatedf, df[i,]) 
     }
}

grid.table(EqDatedf, show.rownames = FALSE)
dev.off()

Answer 2

I really recommend you to use Rstudio with Knitr. It is very easy to create good reports.

For example,

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
<<myTable,results='asis'>>=
library(xtable)
tab <- read.table(text = 'Date    County    Trade
1/1/2012  USA     5
1/1/2012  Japan   4
1/2/2012  USA     10
1/3/2012  Germany 15',header = TRUE)
print(xtable(tab),hline.after=c(2,3))   ## print.xtable have many smart options
@
\end{document}

Answer 3

As of 2017, there is good support in R-studio presentation formats (Markdown) with package "pander", and output to PDF via Beamer. See pander : http://rapporter.github.io/pander/#pander-an-r-pandoc-writer

Example in R-studio presentation code to print a data frame as table :

```{r}    
pander(df)
```

Answer 4

The grid.table solution will be the quickest way to create a PDF for short tables, but this solution will not work as is if you have a table that's longer than 1 page. RStudio + knitr + longtable is probably the way to go to create nicely formatted PDFs. What you'll need is something like:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{longtable}
\begin{document}

<<results='asis'>>=
library(xtable)

df = data.frame(matrix(rnorm(400), nrow=100))
xt = xtable(df)
print(xt, 
      tabular.environment = "longtable",
      floating = FALSE
      )
@
\end{document}

Pls see this post for more details.