Printing nice cross-tabulations in knitr

Question

What I want is to print nice crosstabulations, either in a pdf file, or in a html file, from RStudio, using R, Markdown and knitr. I suspect I am missing something really obvious, because I cannot believe this is so hard. I make cross-tabs with either xtabs or ftable.

What I want is something like a nicely printed version of the R console output.

> x
   Col
Row  A  B  C
  D 15  9  7
  E 13 14  9
  F  8  8 17
> f
    Col  A  B  C
Row             
D       15  9  7
E       13 14  9
F        8  8 17

I've tried several different solutions, none of which really works, and are shown in the attached .Rmd file. (I've tried pdf and html outputs.)

---
title: "trial"
author: "Anthony Staines"
date: "26/08/2014"
output: html_document
---
# Make the data
```{r, echo=TRUE,results='asis',message=FALSE}
library(knitr)
library(memisc)
library(xtable)
library(stargazer)
library(texreg)

set.seed(893)
Col <- sample(c('A','B','C'),100,replace=TRUE)
Row <- sample(c('D','E','F'),100,replace=TRUE)
```

```{r, echo=TRUE,results='asis',message=FALSE}
x <- xtabs(~Row+Col)
x
kable(x)
kable(x,format='html')
kable(x,format='html',output = TRUE)
xx <- xtable(format(x))
print(xx,type='html')
stargazer(x)

f <-ftable(Row,Col)
f
kable(f,format='html')
kable(f,format='html',output = TRUE)
xf <- xtable(format(f))
print(xf,type='html')
stargazer(f)
```

kable comes closest, but does not seem to support row or column names, both of which are essential to me :-

|   |  A|  B|  C|
|:--|--:|--:|--:|
|D  | 15|  9|  7|
|E  | 13| 14|  9|
|F  |  8|  8| 17|

Help appreciated, and my apologies if this is a really stupid question with an obvious and well known answer!

Anthony Staines

Answer 1

An alternative to kable is pander from the package with the same name, which provides an easy way of generating markdown tables with bunch of options (like style) and a generic S3 method:

> pander(x)

-------------------
    A   B   C 
------- --- --- ---
 **D**  15   9   7 

 **E**  13  14   9 

 **F**   8   8  17 
-------------------

> pander(f)

----- ----- --- --- ---
      "Col" "A" "B" "C"

"Row"                  

 "D"        15   9   7 

 "E"        13  14   9 

 "F"         8   8  17 
----- ----- --- --- ---

If you want to generate the old rmarkdown-style pipe tables, add stlye='rmarkdown' parameter, although AFAIK Pandoc is the new standard there as well, which supports the above multi-line table.

Answer 2

I suggest you use stargazer as follows:

• Use quote=FALSE
• Make sure to specify type="html"

Try this:

# stargazer

```{r, echo=TRUE, results='asis'}
stargazer(format(f, quote=FALSE, justify="right"), type="html")
```

Answer 3

Further digging led me to this question.

The answer is embarrassingly obvious - the 'tables' package!

I thought there had to be a simpler way to do this. Many thanks nonetheless to Andrie and daroczig for their helpful responses.