Hide shiny output - r

Question

How do you hide rendered shiny output? Specifically, I have some figures/tables generated by shiny and I have a button, that when clicked should hide the figures/tables, and when clicked again should show them.
This is what I have so far (below), and it works somewhat, but where it's supposed to hide the renderPlot output, there is a big blank space in the document that I am trying to make go away.
It should be possible to just copy and paste this code into Rstudio and hit run document (it's rmarkdown with shiny runtime).
---
runtime: shiny
---
```{r, echo=F}
actionButton("hide", "Hide")
dat <- data.frame(a=1:10, b=rexp(10, 1/10), c=letters[sample(1:24, 10)])
renderTable({
if (input$hide %% 2 == 1)
dat
})
```
lodi dodi
```{r, echo=F}
renderPlot({
if (input$hide %% 2 == 1)
plot(b ~ a, data=dat)
})
```
this text is separated by blank space, but it shouldn't be

Answer 1

You can use the shinyjs package to hide elements with the hide() function (or use the toggle() function to alternate between hiding and showing). Disclaimer: I wrote that package.
I've never used it in an rmarkdown before, so I'm just going to show how to use it in a normal shiny app and use the shinyApp() function to include a full shiny app inside an rmarkdown. You can read here about how to include shiny apps inside an rmarkdown doc.
---
runtime: shiny
---
```{r, echo=F}
suppressPackageStartupMessages(
library(shinyjs)
)
dat <- data.frame(a=1:10, b=rexp(10, 1/10), c=letters[sample(1:24, 10)])
shinyApp(
ui = fluidPage(
useShinyjs(),
actionButton("hide", "Hide"),
p("Text above plot"),
plotOutput("plot"),
p("Text below plot")
),
server = function(input, output, session) {
output$plot <- renderPlot({
plot(b ~ a, data=dat)
})
observeEvent(input$hide, {
hide("plot")
# toggle("plot") if you want to alternate between hiding and showing
})
},
options = list(height = 700)
)
```
In order to be able to use hide, I had to:
install and load shinyjs
add a call to useShinyjs() in the UI
call hide or toggle on the element that you want to hide/show
I hope this helps