Preserve row/column labels from table() using kable and knitr

Question

The table function in base R adds nice row/column labels, but when I use knitr::kable these go away. Any simple way to keep these, aside from adding them on the html/markdown side?

Reproducible example:

library(knitr)

# reproducibility
set.seed(123) 

# here's a df
some_data <-
  data.frame(a=sample(c('up','down'), 10, replace=T),
             b=sample(c('big','small'), 10, replace=T))

# using table() you get nice labels ('a' and 'b', in this case)
table(some_data)

# that goes away with kable, in either markdown or html format (I care about html)
kable(table(some_data))
kable(table(some_data), format='html')

Answer 1

@Yihui should get the credit for this. Straight from the printr package:

# BEGINNING of Rmd file:

```{r echo=FALSE}
# devtools::install_github("yihui/printr")
require(printr)

# reproducibility
set.seed(123) 

# here's a df
some_data <-
  data.frame(a=sample(c('up','down'), 10, replace=T),
             b=sample(c('big','small'), 10, replace=T))

table(some_data)
```

# End of Rmd file

Results in:

|a/b  | big| small|
|:----|---:|-----:|
|down |   5|     1|
|up   |   0|     4|