A small helper function around webshot and knitr::kable to save the HTML representation of a dataframe as an image file (.png)

dataframe_as_image.R

#This function depends on the knitr and webshot packages, uncomment lines 2-6 below if you need to install them first
#install.packages("knitr")
#install.packages("devtools")
#library(devtools)
#devtools::install_github("wch/webshot")
#webshot::install_phantomjs()

#Feel free to move the library() calls for knitr and webshot outside the function. 


dataframe_as_image <- function(dfr, img_path) {
  suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(knitr))
  suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(webshot))
  html <- kable(dfr, format="html", table.attr = "id=\"df\"")
  tmp_path <- tempfile(pattern = "dfrasimg_", fileext = "html")
  write(html, file=tmp_path)
  webshot("test.html", img_path, selector="table#df")
  file.remove(tmp_path)
  return(img_path)
}

#Example usage:
dfr <- read.csv(file.choose())
img_path <- dataframe_as_image(dfr, "my_dataframe.png")




#Released as public domain, or licensed under CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.txt), 
#whichever gives you the most rights in your legislation.