tables in pander, style="multiline"

Question

I'm using RStudio 0.98.1056 on Windows 7, and whatever the current version of pander is on CRAN as of today (I just installed the package).

I'm trying to use the knitr->Markdown->.docx literate-programming workflow to create a table in Word. Some of the cells need to contain hard line breaks. I believe this should be possible based on info in the following link:

http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/authoring_pandoc_markdown.html

It says, "A backslash followed by a newline is also a hard line break. Note: in multiline and grid table cells, this is the only way to create a hard line break, since trailing spaces in the cells are ignored."

I'm trying to create a table with cells containing line breaks in the following way:

library(pander)
a <- c(1:10)
b <- c(11:20)
ab <- paste(a,b,sep='\n')
N <- ceiling(rpois(10,9))
labels <- paste("Question",c(1:10))
mytable <- data.frame(labels,ab,N)
pandoc.table(mytable, style="multiline")

But the newline just gets stripped. Same if I use sep="< newline>" or sep="< br>" (without leading spaces). I have also tried adding an extra backslash, in case R was "eating" the first one; and switching up the "paste" function to include each of these possible separators as a term in their own right, instead of in the sep= argument. None of these things worked.

I went to try out the example code in the pander help documentation, just as a sanity check, and it seems the issue is general -- sample code that I thought should produce multiline tables did not, on my machine.

Has anyone else gotten multiline tables in pander to work?

Answer 1

Yup, please install the development version from GitHub -- this issue was fixed a few months ago. E.g.:

> panderOptions('keep.line.breaks', TRUE)
> pander(mytable)

--------------------
labels      ab   N  
----------- ---- ---
Question 1  1    11 
            11      

Question 2  2    6  
            12      

Question 3  3    13 
            13      

Question 4  4    12 
            14      

Question 5  5    6  
            15      

Question 6  6    6  
            16      

Question 7  7    11 
            17      

Question 8  8    19 
            18      

Question 9  9    10 
            19      

Question 10 10   9  
            20      
--------------------