How to put an image from Knitr & a flextable side-by-side in RMarkdown HTML doc

Question

I have an image that I need to grab from the internet and I need to place it to the side of a flextable. My closest attempt is as follows:

library(knitr)
library(dplyr)
library(grid)
library(gridExtra)

url <- "https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/rickroll-header.jpg?q=50&fit=contain&w=1140&h=&dpr=1.5"
mrRick <- knitr::include_graphics(url)

myTable <- data.frame(Test = c(1,2,3,4,5),
                      Test2 = c(1,2,3,4,5)) %>%
  flextable()

grid.arrange(rasterGrob(mrRick), gen_grob(myTable))

Unfortunately this gives me the error no applicable method for 'as.raster' applied to an object of class "c('knit_image_paths', 'knit_asis')" and I'm not sure how to go about fixing this. I am open to using other packages to download the image or to arrange the table and image together.

Answer 1

Putting this in a knitr chunk seems to work for me:

library(knitr)
library(flextable)
library(dplyr)
library(grid)
library(gridExtra)
library(png)

url <- "https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/rickroll-header.jpg?q=50&fit=contain&w=1140&h=&dpr=1.5"
tf <- tempfile(fileext = '.jpg')

download.file(url, destfile = tf, mode = "wb")

myTable <- data.frame(Test = c(1,2,3,4,5),
                      Test2 = c(1,2,3,4,5)) |>
  flextable()

jpeg::readJPEG(tf) |>
  rasterGrob() |>
  list(gen_grob(myTable)) |>
  marrangeGrob(ncol = 2, nrow = 1)

I obtain output that looks like this:

A second option is side by side divs in HTML in your Rmd (the code below assumes you've saved the file path in tf:

```{r fig.width=4, fig.height=6,echo=FALSE,out.extra='style="float:left"'}
knitr::include_graphics(tf)

```

```{r echo=FALSE, out.extra='style="float:left"'}
data.frame(Test = c(1,2,3,4,5),
                      Test2 = c(1,2,3,4,5)) |>
  flextable()
```

<div style="clear: both;"></div>

which will look like this: