Programmatically creating Markdown tables in R with KnitR

Question

I am just starting to learn about KnitR and the use of Markdown in generating R documents and reports. This looks to be perfect for a lot of the day to day reporting that I have to do with my job. However, one thing that I'm not seeing is an easy way to print data frames and tables using Markdown formatting (sort of like xtable, but with Markdown instead of LaTeX or HTML). I know that I can just embed the HTML output from xtable, but I was wondering if there were any Markdown-based solutions?

Answer 1

Now knitr (since version 1.3) package include the kable function for a creation tables:

> library(knitr) > kable(head(iris[,1:3]), format = "markdown") |  Sepal.Length|  Sepal.Width|  Petal.Length| |-------------:|------------:|-------------:| |           5,1|          3,5|           1,4| |           4,9|          3,0|           1,4| |           4,7|          3,2|           1,3| |           4,6|          3,1|           1,5| |           5,0|          3,6|           1,4| |           5,4|          3,9|           1,7| 

UPDATED: if you get raw markdown in a document try setup results = "asis" chunk option.

Answer 2

Two packages that will do this are pander

library(devtools) install_github('pander', 'Rapporter') 

Or ascii

pander is a slightly different approach to report construction, (but can be useful for this feature).

ascii will allow you to print with type = 'pandoc (or various other markdown flavours)

library(ascii) print(ascii(head(iris[,1:3])), type = 'pandoc')        **Sepal.Length**   **Sepal.Width**   **Petal.Length**   --- ------------------ ----------------- ------------------ 1   5.10               3.50              1.40               2   4.90               3.00              1.40               3   4.70               3.20              1.30               4   4.60               3.10              1.50               5   5.00               3.60              1.40               6   5.40               3.90              1.70               --- ------------------ ----------------- ------------------ 

Note that in both these cases, it is directed towards using pandoc to convert from markdown to your desired document type, however using style='rmarkdown' will create tables that are compatible with this markdown package and inbuilt conversion in rstudio.