R Shiny: htmlOutput removes white spaces I need - html

Question

I have a string like this for example:
SomeName SomeValue
A much longer name AnotherValue
Even longer name than before NewValue
Let's say I have this text correctly in a R variable like
variable<-"SomeName SomeValue<br\>A much longer name AnotherValue<br\>Even longer name than before NewValue<br\>
In my ui.R:
...htmlOutput("TextTable")
And in my server.R
output$TextTable<- renderUI({
HTML(variable)
})
But the output isn't the way I want it. All white spaces are deleted except one. So the "columns" aren't as they should be in my output. How can I avoid this?

Answer 1

If I remember correctly, browsers tend to shorten consecutive whitespaces in HTML code to a single character. Don't put the whitespace in your r variable. Store the data as a matrix, and use renderTable.
##server.R
library(shiny)
shinyServer(function(input, output) {
variable = c("SomeName","SomeValue","A much longer name","AnotherValue","Even longer name than before", "NewValue")
variable = matrix(data = variable, ncol = 2)
output$TextTable<- renderTable({variable},include.rownames = FALSE,include.colnames = FALSE)
})
##ui.R
library(shiny)
shinyUI(fluidPage(titlePanel(""),
sidebarLayout(sidebarPanel(),
mainPanel(uiOutput("TextTable")
)
)
))
Update
On the other hand, if your text is already in that format, you can prevent a browser from collapsing whitespace using the <pre> tag. In your case, you could use the following code:
output$TextTable<- renderUI(HTML(paste0("<pre>",variable,"</pre>")))