I'm been having a very difficult time adding an external link to a navbarMenu selection in R Shiny. Specifically, when a hyperlink is added to a tabPanel title in navbarMenu, it creates an additional "phantom" tab with no text.
I asked this on stack overflow here
Here is some example code to hopefully demonstrate the problem. Using a hyperlink in the base navbarPage title works as intended (no phantom tab is created), but when the same method is used in a tabPanel or navbarMenu (with tabPanel) it adds a phantom tab.
library(shiny); library(shinythemes)
ui <- bootstrapPage("",
navbarPage(
id = "navbar",
theme = shinytheme("yeti"),
title = a("Home", href = "https://google.com", style = "color:white;"), ## page title with hyperlink and browser tab title (works as intended)
tabPanel(title = HTML("Panel_1</a></li><li><a href='http://google.com' target='_blank'>test")), ## tabPanel hyperlink test (adds "phantom" tab)
navbarMenu(title = "Test Menu",
tabPanel(title = a("Open Sales Gsheet", href="http://google.com", target="_blank")) ## navbarMenu hyperlink test (adds "phantom" option)
)
)
)
server <- function(input, output, session) {
## empty server
}
shinyApp(ui, server)
Here is an image of what that basic app outputs: 
(NOTE: I included target='_blank' only because it was included in the stack overflow answers. I would not add this to the hyperlink in my Shiny app).
I've spent a good deal of time trying to dig through the actual navbarMenu list structure to try and manually update the object, but I have limited experience with HTML and/or javascript... so I'm really lost here. Any help would be appreciated!