Display a paged_table() in an HTML document

Question

I've got a function that, for some given data, outputs various tables and plots. I'd like to use this in an R notebook that gets knitted to HTML.

I rather like the way that tibbles and data frames are shown in knitted HTML documents by default:

However, this only works when a data frame/tibble is printed at the top level, not within a function call (unless the result gets returned and reaches the top level). So what can I do when I wish to output a data frame/tibble this way within a function? So far I've that

• using print(mtcars) produces the same plain-ASCII rendering you'd get on the R console;
• using rmarkdown::paged_table(mtcars) produces the nice-looking table above, but this isn't output (unless it happens to reach the top level); and
• using print(rmarkdown::paged_table(mtcars)) again only produces the plain-ASCII rendering.

So what function is called to actually output the paged table? What do I need to to have e.g.

---
title: "R Notebook"
output:
  html_document:
    df_print: paged
---

```{r}
do_things <- function() {

    rmarkdown::paged_table(mtcars)
    return(1)
    
}

do_things()

work as expected? Thanks!

EDIT: I've taken a look at knitr::knit_print() and knitr::asis_output() as well, both of which seemed like they might be useful. No combination of these worked; in particular, knitr::knit_print(rmarkdown::paged_table(mtcars)), which I naively expected might actually Do The Right Thing, does not print anything at all when invoked inside a function.

Answer 1

Try cat with print method print.paged_df,

---
title: "R Notebook"
output:
  html_document:
    df_print: paged
---

```{r}
#| results: asis

print_paged_df <- function(...) {
  cat(rmarkdown:::print.paged_df(rmarkdown::paged_table(...)))
}
  
do_things <- function() {
    print_paged_df(mtcars)
    return(1)
}

do_things()
```

Note the use of ::: to access the print.paged_df, since it is an unexported function of {rmarkdown}

---

---