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

@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)# reproducibilityset.seed(123) # here's a dfsome_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|

Neat that someone else posted a bounty on my old question. Anyway, if it's helpful, my solution was a homebrew html generator function

table_label <- function(tbl) {  # table dimensions  rows <- dim(tbl)[1]  cols <- dim(tbl)[2]  # get started  html_out <- '<table>\n'  # first row: label only  blank_cell <- '<td> </td>'  html_out <-     paste0(html_out,           '\t<tr>',           blank_cell,            '<td>', names(dimnames(tbl))[2], '</td>', # column label           rep(blank_cell, cols-2),           '</tr>\n')  # second row:  html_out <-     paste0(html_out,           '\t<tr>',           # label...           '<td>', names(dimnames(tbl))[1], '</td>',           # ...and headers           paste0('<td>', dimnames(tbl)[[2]], '</td>', collapse=''),           '</tr>\n')  # subsequent rows  for (i in 1:rows) {    html_out <-       paste0(html_out,             '\t<tr>',             # header...              '<td>', dimnames(tbl)[[1]][i], '</td>',                                     # ...and values             paste0('<td>', tbl[i,], '</td>', collapse=''),             '</tr>\n')  }  # last row  html_out <- paste0(html_out, '</table>')  return(html_out)}

Now this markdown doc:

Produce table```{r}set.seed(123) some_data <-  data.frame(a=sample(c('up','down'), 10, replace=T),             b=sample(c('big','small', 'medium'), 10, replace=T))tbl <- table(some_data)```Now display```{r, results='asis'}cat(table_label(tbl))```

Produces the results I had wanted:

The generated html is somewhat readable, too:

<table>    <tr><td> </td><td>b</td><td> </td></tr>    <tr><td>a</td><td>big</td><td>medium</td><td>small</td></tr>    <tr><td>down</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>2</td></tr>    <tr><td>up</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>0</td></tr></table>

Not an optimal solution (as Pandoc's markdown does not support col/rowspans), but give a try to pander, which is intended to transform R objects into markdown with ease (and bunch of options):

> library(pander)> pander(ftable(some_data))------ --- ----- -------       "b" "big" "small" "a"                    "down"       5      1    "up"        0      4   ------ --- ----- -------> pander(ftable(some_data), style = 'rmarkdown')|        |     |       |         ||:------:|:---:|:-----:|:-------:||        | "b" | "big" | "small" ||  "a"   |     |       |         || "down" |     |   5   |    1    ||  "up"  |     |   0   |    4    |