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Bold format certain string in shiny datatable using regex

I have a datatable in a Shiny app. This datatable has a column with multiple strings. I need to format one string pattern in this column to bold using regex. The following reprex needs to bold string "H2", but I need a regex solution.

library(shiny)
library(DT)

data <- data.frame(V1 = 1:3, V2 = c("H1, H2, H3", "H5, H2, H6", "H4, H3, H5"))

ui <- fluidPage(
  "How can I make only 'H2' bold??",
  DTOutput("table", width = 500)
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  
  output$table <- renderDT(datatable(data))
  
}

shinyApp(ui, server)
Solution

  • One option would be to use e.g. gsub to wrap the text you want bold inside an HTML b tag and set escape=FALSE in datatable().

    EDIT: Following the suggestion from @DavidJorquera I generalized the code a bit by adding the serach pattern and the tag as variables.

    library(shiny)
library(DT)

data <- data.frame(V1 = 1:3, V2 = c("H1, H2, H3", "H5, H2, H6", "H4, H3, H5"))

ui <- fluidPage(
  "How can I make only 'H2' bold??",
  DTOutput("table", width = 500)
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  
  output$table <- renderDT({
    pattern <- "H2"
    data$V2 <- gsub(pattern, paste0("<b>", pattern, "</b>"), data$V2)
    datatable(data, escape = FALSE)
  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)
#> 
#> Listening on http://127.0.0.1:5145