DT::datatable – Format selected column?

So far the only way I can get it to work is by manually setting the HTML tags first, and then using escape = FALSE

Here we wrap Sepal.Length in the bold HTML tag:

iris$SepalLength2 <- paste0("<b>", iris$Sepal.Length, "</b>")>

Then use escape = FALSE so that the HTML tags are parsed.

datatable(iris, 
          class = 'row-border stripe hover compact', 
          rownames = F, 
          autoHideNavigation = T, escape =FALSE)

Edit:

For align left/right, you can wrap in a <p align ="left"></p>

So: iris$SepalLength2 <- paste0('<p align ="right"><b>', iris$Sepal.Length, '</b></p>')

Note that I am neither an HTML guru, nor an expert on this particular library, but this seems like one way to get your desired result.

It has been a while since this question was initially asked, but I just had this same problem. Here is a simpler solution that doesn't require editing the source data or calling JS, but instead uses functions within the DT package itself.

DT::datatable(iris, 
          class = 'row-border stripe hover compact', 
          rownames = F, 
          autoHideNavigation = T, escape =FALSE) %>% 
  formatStyle(columns = c("Sepal.Length"), fontWeight = 'bold', `text-align` = 'left') %>% 
  formatStyle(columns = c("Petal.Length"), fontWeight = 'bold', `text-align` = 'right')