You have successfully removed the row names. The print.data.frame method just shows the row numbers if no row names are present.

df1 <- data.frame(values = rnorm(3), group = letters[1:3],
row.names = paste0("RowName", 1:3))
print(df1)
#            values group
#RowName1 -1.469809     a
#RowName2 -1.164943     b
#RowName3  0.899430     c


rownames(df1) <- NULL
print(df1)
#     values group
#1 -1.469809     a
#2 -1.164943     b
#3  0.899430     c

You can suppress printing the row names and numbers in print.data.frame with the argument row.names as FALSE.

print(df1, row.names = FALSE)
#     values group
# -1.4345829     d
#  0.2182768     e
# -0.2855440     f

Edit: As written in the comments, you want to convert this to HTML. From the xtable and print.xtable documentation, you can see that the argument include.rownames will do the trick.

library("xtable")
print(xtable(df1), type="html", include.rownames = FALSE)
#<!-- html table generated in R 3.1.0 by xtable 1.7-3 package -->
#<!-- Thu Jun 26 12:50:17 2014 -->
#<TABLE border=1>
#<TR> <TH> values </TH> <TH> group </TH>  </TR>
#<TR> <TD align="right"> -0.34 </TD> <TD> a </TD> </TR>
#<TR> <TD align="right"> -1.04 </TD> <TD> b </TD> </TR>
#<TR> <TD align="right"> -0.48 </TD> <TD> c </TD> </TR>
#</TABLE>

Yes I know it is over half a year later and a tad late, BUT

row.names(df) <- NULL

does work. For me at least :-)

And if you have important information in row.names like dates for example, what I do is just :

df$Dates <- as.Date(row.names(df))

This will add a new column on the end but if you want it at the beginning of your data frame

df <- df[,c(7,1,2,3,4,5,6,...)]

Hope this helps those from Google :)

Recently I had the same problem when using htmlTable() (‘htmlTable’ package) and I found a simpler solution: convert the data frame to a matrix with as.matrix():

htmlTable(as.matrix(df))

And be sure that the rownames are just indices. as.matrix() conservs the same columnames. That's it.

UPDATE

Following the comment of @DMR, I did't notice that htmlTable() has the parameter rnames = FALSE for cases like this. So a better answer would be:

htmlTable(df, rnames = FALSE)

If you want to format your table via kable, you can use row.names = F

kable(df, row.names = F)

My answer is intended for comment though but since i havent got enough reputation, i think it will still be relevant as an answer and help some one.

I find datatable in library DT robust to handle rownames, and columnames

Library DT
datatable(df, rownames = FALSE)  # no row names

refer to https://rstudio.github.io/DT/ for usage scenarios

A dplyr solution :

df = df %>% `rownames<-`( NULL )

...or simply:

library(tidyverse)


df_data_with_rownames %>%
SOME STUFF %>%
tibble::remove_rownames() -> wrangled_df_data_without_rownames

Another simple way is assigning c() to your rownames to get rid of your row names like this (thanks @Anders for data):

df <- data.frame(values = rnorm(3), group = letters[1:3],
row.names = paste0("RowName", 1:3))
df
#>             values group
#> RowName1 0.4189236     a
#> RowName2 1.8604397     b
#> RowName3 0.7030387     c
rownames(df) <- c()
print(df)
#>      values group
#> 1 0.4189236     a
#> 2 1.8604397     b
#> 3 0.7030387     c

^{Created on 2022-07-09 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}

I just wanted to add that data.table has an option for removing rownames when printing data.table's.

options(datatable.print.rownames = F)

This solved my problem in the console and when rendering RMarkdown files. See other printing options here

simply try rownames(df) <- ""