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

Check out Quarto (the new version of R Markdown). It has enhanced support for markdown tables.

I don't know if there is a way, however, to just print a dataframe into a markdown table. I have not seen that. Most people would use something like the `jtools` or `gt` (or like you mentioned `xtable`) to build their tables and then knit (now 'render') the document. However, the tables from those packages look pretty good in the context of quarto document which is based on pandoc markdown and can be converted into virtually any format you can think of.