kable: Create tables in LaTeX, HTML, Markdown and reStructuredText

Description

A very simple table generator, and it is simple by design. It is not intended to replace any other R packages for making tables. The kable() function returns a single table for a single data object, and returns a table that contains multiple tables if the input object is a list of data objects. The kables() function is similar to kable(x) when x is a list of data objects, but kables() accepts a list of kable() values directly instead of data objects (see examples below).

Usage

kable(
  x,
  format,
  digits = getOption("digits"),
  row.names = NA,
  col.names = NA,
  align,
  caption = opts_current$get("tab.cap"),
  label = NULL,
  format.args = list(),
  escape = TRUE,
  ...
)
kables(x, format, caption = NULL, label = NULL)

Value

A character vector of the table source code.

Arguments

x: For kable(), x is an R object, which is typically a matrix or data frame. For kables(), a list with each element being a returned value from kable().
format: A character string. Possible values are latex, html, pipe (Pandoc's pipe tables), simple (Pandoc's simple tables), rst, jira, and org (Emacs Org-mode). The value of this argument will be automatically determined if the function is called within a knitr document. The format value can also be set in the global option knitr.table.format. If format is a function, it must return a character string.
digits: Maximum number of digits for numeric columns, passed to round(). This can also be a vector of length ncol(x), to set the number of digits for individual columns.
row.names: Logical: whether to include row names. By default, row names are included if rownames(x) is neither NULL nor identical to 1:nrow(x).
col.names: A character vector of column names to be used in the table.
align: Column alignment: a character vector consisting of 'l' (left), 'c' (center) and/or 'r' (right). By default or if align = NULL, numeric columns are right-aligned, and other columns are left-aligned. If length(align) == 1L, the string will be expanded to a vector of individual letters, e.g. 'clc' becomes c('c', 'l', 'c'), unless the output format is LaTeX.
caption: The table caption. By default, it is retrieved from the chunk option tab.cap.
label: The table reference label. By default, the label is obtained from knitr::opts_current$get('label') (i.e., the current chunk label). To disable the label, use label = NA.
format.args: A list of arguments to be passed to format() to format table values, e.g. list(big.mark = ',').
escape: Boolean; whether to escape special characters when producing HTML or LaTeX tables. When escape = FALSE, you have to make sure that special characters will not trigger syntax errors in LaTeX or HTML.
...: Other arguments (see Examples and References).

Details

Missing values (NA) in the table are displayed as NA by default. If you want to display them with other characters, you can set the option knitr.kable.NA, e.g. options(knitr.kable.NA = '') to hide NA values.

You can set the option knitr.kable.max_rows to limit the number of rows to show in the table, e.g., options(knitr.kable.max_rows = 30).

References

See https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/kable.html for some examples about this function, including specific arguments according to the format selected.

Examples

Run this code

d1 = head(iris)
d2 = head(mtcars)
# pipe tables by default
kable(d1)
kable(d2[, 1:5])
# no inner padding
kable(d2, format = "pipe", padding = 0)
# more padding
kable(d2, format = "pipe", padding = 2)
kable(d1, format = "latex")
kable(d1, format = "html")
kable(d1, format = "latex", caption = "Title of the table")
kable(d1, format = "html", caption = "Title of the table")
# use the booktabs package
kable(mtcars, format = "latex", booktabs = TRUE)
# use the longtable package
kable(matrix(1000, ncol = 5), format = "latex", digits = 2, longtable = TRUE)
# change LaTeX default table environment
kable(d1, format = "latex", caption = "My table", table.envir = "table*")
# add some table attributes
kable(d1, format = "html", table.attr = "id=\"mytable\"")
# reST output
kable(d2, format = "rst")
# no row names
kable(d2, format = "rst", row.names = FALSE)
# Pandoc simple tables
kable(d2, format = "simple", caption = "Title of the table")
# format numbers using , as decimal point, and ' as thousands separator
x = as.data.frame(matrix(rnorm(60, 1e+06, 10000), 10))
kable(x, format.args = list(decimal.mark = ",", big.mark = "'"))
# save the value
x = kable(d2, format = "html")
cat(x, sep = "\n")
# can also set options(knitr.table.format = 'html') so that the output is HTML

# multiple tables via either kable(list(x1, x2)) or kables(list(kable(x1),
# kable(x2)))
kable(list(d1, d2), caption = "A tale of two tables")
kables(list(kable(d1, align = "l"), kable(d2)), caption = "A tale of two tables")

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