Why reactable is not working with print() in Quarto

[shafayetShafee]

While reactable(iris) is working as intended, print(reactable(iris)) is not showing any table in the output. Would anyone kindly help me to understand this behavior or point me to a direction where I would find a detailed discussion about this?

Reprex

---
title: "Printing Reactable"
format: html
---

```{r}
library(reactable)

reactable(iris)
```

```{r}
print(reactable(iris))
```

Though there's no specific reason to use print(reactable(iris)) instead of reactable(iris), but while working with reactable in Quarto, noticed this behavior and failed to understand why this is happening by myself. Any help is truly appreciated 😊.

[cderv]

This is not specific to Quarto, it will be exactly the same with rmarkdown. This is due to the way knitr is working - knitr being the R package used for handling R code chunks within a Quarto document using R.

knitr::knit_print() will be the function used for printing, and method used depends on the object class. For reactable, I believe htmlwidgets methods will be used. print() will not return a printable object for knitr - only the knit_print() method will.

The general rule is that print() should rarely be called directly in a code chunk as usually we won't know how to handle the printing for inside a knitting.

More on this in https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/opts-render.html and https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/knitr/vignettes/knit_print.html

Hope it helps understand

[shafayetShafee]

Oh, got it. Thanks.