why does kable not print when used within a function in rmarkdown

Question

I have to repeat certain outputs in many rmarkdown reports and want to write a function to use for this.

Calling a function outputs plots ok when I knit the rmd file but not kable data frames.

For example

---
title: "Markdown example"
output: html_document
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```

# Markdown example
```{r mtcars}
make_outputs <- function(){
  knitr::kable(head(mtcars))
  plot(mtcars$mpg, mtcars$cyl)
  hist(mtcars$cyl)
}

make_outputs()

```

Displays the plots but not the kable table.

Answer 1

You can do this by using print to print the kable output, setting the results="asis" of the code chunk and then using kable_styling from package kableExtra.

This works for me:

```{r mtcars, results='asis'}

library(kableExtra)
library(knitr)

make_outputs <- function(){
  print(kable_styling(kable(head(mtcars))))
  plot(mtcars$mpg, mtcars$cyl)
  hist(mtcars$cyl)
}

make_outputs()
```