What HTML is
An HTML table is a table element containing thead and tbody, with th cells for headers and td cells for data.
Web pages, email templates and anything pasted into a CMS.
What R DataFrame is
R code that builds a data.frame from character vectors.
Statistics and R notebooks.
What changes when you convert HTML to R DataFrame
The first table in the markup is used. Cell contents are stripped of inline tags and entities are decoded, so <td><b>Total</b> </td> arrives as Total. Nested tables inside a cell are not descended into.
stringsAsFactors is set to FALSE explicitly. It has defaulted to FALSE since R 4.0, but being explicit means the snippet behaves the same on older installs.
What carries over from HTML to R DataFrame
HTML records 2 things about a table that R data frame has no way to hold.
R data frame wants a type for each column, and HTML does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
HTML can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. R data frame has only flat cells, so nested values are flattened into one cell rather than being spread across columns.
Anything visual in the HTML - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in R data frame and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the R DataFrame as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a R DataFrame file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the R DataFrame.