How to open a local html file from R in an operating system independent way?

Question

How to open a local html file from R in an operating system independent way?

For demonstration purposes, assume that the file is called test.html and is in the working directory.

initial thoughts

• system('gnome-open test.html')
  • This works on Ubuntu
• browseURL(paste('file://', getwd(),'test.html', sep='/'))
  • This works on Ubuntu, but it feels like a bit of a hack and I'm not certain whether it would work on Windows.

Answer 1

You might find my open.file.in.OS function useful, sources can be found here.

A short summary about what this function does:

1. Check platform
2. Based on platform, call:
   • shell.exec on Windows
   • open with system on Mac
   • and xdg-open with system on other Unix-like operating system
3. Uses shQuote on the privided file

---

Update: See now the openFileInOS in the pander package.

library(pander)
openFileInOS("d:/del/dt/a.html")

References: this function is a forked version of David Hajage's convert function can be found here.

Answer 2

I just wanted to pull the answer given by @daroczig out of the comments and into an answer. If @darcozig wants to post this as a separate answer, I'll delete this copy.

openHTML <- function(x) browseURL(paste0('file://', file.path(getwd(), x)))

Answer 3

Use the file.path function to construct the file path.

 file.path(..., fsep = .Platform$file.sep)


 ...: character vectors.

fsep: the path separator to use.

By default it will use the current os path separator.

For example

> file.path ("", "home", "phoxis", "paragraph")
[1] "/home/phoxis/paragraph"

This generates my file "/home/phoxis/paragraph"

Note the blank string "" at the beginning. This forces to ad an extra "/" in my case to generate the absolute path. Adjust to generate absolute or relative path as per your need and have a look at ?file.path

I think this will fulfil your needs