Create LaTex tables from R output

Creating reasonable layouted LaTeX tables from R output was easier then expected. I should have googled it long ago…

install.packages("xtable")

Lets say you created a tabular output in R called “tab1”, e.g by doing:
data(CO2)
tab1 <- with(CO2, table(Treatment , Type))
tab1

your text output in R would look like

Type
Treatment Quebec Mississippi
nonchilled 21 21
chilled 21 21

Now you would like this or whatever table or data.frame as a nice LaTeX-table, the only thing to do is:
library(xtable)
xtable(tab1)

and the output will be:

% latex table generated in R 2.9.0 by xtable 1.5-5 package
% Wed Jul 08 16:20:54 2009
\begin{table}[ht]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{rrr}
\hline
& Quebec & Mississippi \\
\hline
nonchilled & 21 & 21 \\
chilled & 21 & 21 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}

If you are using Sweave the usage becomes
<< echo = FALSE , results = tex >>
library(xtable)
data(CO2)
with(CO2, xtable(table(Treatment , Type)))
@
and a the result of the R run is a LaTeX document. Another post will give a hint how to paste R graphics into the same Sweave or LaTeX document… later…

The full usage of xtable() is
xtable(x, caption=NULL, label=NULL, align=NULL, digits=NULL, display=NULL)
.. add table captions
xtable(table , caption = "My table caption")
and labels
xtable(table , label = " MyLaTeXlable")
to the LaTeX tables.

Advertisement