tableHTML in shiny: show an image in a cell

I want to show an image in a shiny UI cell using tableHTML. However, it is simply displaying the text. Any help?

library(shiny)
a = data.frame(rows = 1:2, icons = '<img src = 
   "http://flaglane.com/download/american-flag/american-flag-graphic.png"  
    alt="Red Flag Warning"  height="30" width="40" >')



  shinyApp(
     ui = fluidPage(
      fluidRow(

  br(),
  column(width = 1),
  tableHTML_output("mytable"))
    ), 
 server = function(input, output) {
  output$mytable <- render_tableHTML( 
    tableHTML(a)
  )}
 )

This is what is shown after I run the code:

Solution

This is a known issue with tableHTML and it is due to be fixed in the next release. For the time being (your link doesn't seem to point to a picture so I ll use one from w3school) you can use this:

library(shiny)
library(tableHTML)
a = data.frame(rows = 1:2, icons = '<img src = 
               "https://www.w3schools.com/images/w3schools_green.jpg"  
               alt="Red Flag Warning"  height="30" width="40" >')



shinyApp(
 ui = fluidPage(
  fluidRow(

   br(),
   column(width = 1),
   tableHTML_output("mytable")) 

 ), 
 server = function(input, output) {
  output$mytable <- render_tableHTML( 
   tableHTML(a) %>%
    replace_html(pattern = '&#60;', '<', replace_all = TRUE) %>%
    replace_html(pattern = '&#62;', '>', replace_all = TRUE)
  )}
)

Output: