how to insert new line in R shiny string

Question

In shiny, I have the following:

  output$sequenceText <- renderText({
    showSequence()
  })

showSequence <- reactive({
  selectedSeqs <- as.numeric(input$sequenceSelect)
  resultString <- ""
  currentString <-""

  for(i in selectedSeqs){
    currentString <- paste(i, toString(myProts[i]), sep = ":")
    resultString <- paste(resultString, currentString, sep = "\n")
  }
  return(resultString)

})

However, it doesn't seem that the new line character is respected. How do I fix that?

Thanks!

Answer 1

To my knowledge, there are only two options to display multiple lines within shiny. One way with using verbatimTextOutput which will provide a gray box around you text (personal preference). The other is to use renderUI and htmlOutput to use raw html. Here is a basic working example to demonstrate the results.

require(shiny)
runApp(
  list(
    ui = pageWithSidebar(
      headerPanel("multi-line test"),
      sidebarPanel(
        p("Demo Page.")
      ),
      mainPanel(
        verbatimTextOutput("text"),
        htmlOutput("text2")
      )
    ),
    server = function(input, output){

      output$text <- renderText({
        paste("hello", "world", sep="\n")
      })

      output$text2 <- renderUI({
        HTML(paste("hello", "world", sep="<br/>"))
      })

    }
  )
)

This yields the following figure: