Convert dataframe to markdown table in Quarto

Question

I would like to convert a dataframe to a markdown table to use in html Quarto. We could use the simplermarkdown package with md_table to convert a dataframe to a markdown table. But the problem is that the output of the markdown is not converted to a html table. You can do this by copying the output and put it in the document, this is of course not automatically. Here is some reproducible code:

--- 
title: "example"
format: html
---

```{r}
library(simplermarkdown)
md_table(head(iris))
```

This is copied from output above:

|Sepal.Length|Sepal.Width|Petal.Length|Petal.Width|Species|
|------------|-----------|------------|-----------|-------|
|5.1         |3.5        |1.4         |0.2        |setosa |
|4.9         |3.0        |1.4         |0.2        |setosa |
|4.7         |3.2        |1.3         |0.2        |setosa |
|4.6         |3.1        |1.5         |0.2        |setosa |
|5.0         |3.6        |1.4         |0.2        |setosa |
|5.4         |3.9        |1.7         |0.4        |setosa |

Output:

As you can see, the output of the function does return the markdown format but doesn't automatically convert it to the desired output (like the copied code). So I was wondering if anyone knows how to automatically convert a dataframe to a markdown table in quarto?

Answer 1

Why going the extra way to cat the generated md table and output asis to generate html, if you are using knitr engine anyways? knitrhas a function kablefor tableling dataframes to markdown, html, and pdf. so we can directly convert the dataframe to an html table, without using intermediate markdown.

knitr::kable(head(iris),format = "html") # output format specification is optional

Answer 2

Try with output: asis and cat.

--- 
title: "example"
format: html
---

```{r}
#| output: asis
library(simplermarkdown)
cat(md_table(head(iris)))
```

---