rmarkdown & kable/kableextra: Printing % symbol in Table when using escape = F
I want to create a table in a pdf-document using rmarkdwon and kable. In the header there has to be a linebreak, so to do so i need to set escape = F. The table itself contains percent-values as strings including the % symbol (for example: "13%"). I found here https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/34580/escape-character-in-latex that % is a special character in La(Tex) and i have to exclude it using \%. But how can i create and store a string "\%" in R? I've tried the following but nothing worked for me:
gsub("%", "\%", c("14%", "15%", "16%"))
Error: '\%' is an unrecognized escape in character string starting ""\%"
gsub("%", "\\%", c("14%", "15%", "16%"))
[1] "14%" "15%" "16%"
> cat("\\%")
\%
gsub("%", cat("\\%"), c("14%", "15%", "16%"))
\%
Error in gsub("%", cat("\\%"), c("14%", "15%", "16%")) :
invalid 'replacement' argument
Does anybody know the solution for this problem?
Thanks in advance
edit: Here is some example code for my problem:
edit of the edit: in my made up data.frame testtable i forgot to set stringsAsFactors = F. Thats what caused the differences to my real-data results. I've added it to the code and updated the output-pictures
---
title: "Table with % and linbebreak"
output:
# html_document: default
pdf_document:
keep_tex: yes
fig_caption: yes
lang: de
---
```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE, warning = FALSE, error = FALSE, dev=c('pdf','png'), dpi=500)
library(dplyr)
library(data.table)
library(reshape2)
library(knitr)
library(markdown)
library(kableExtra)
library(psych)
library(survey)
library(ggplot2)
set.seed(123)
testtable = data.frame(matrix(paste0(sample(1:100,16, replace = T), "%"), nrow = 4, byrow = T), stringsAsFactors = F)
testtable$group = c("Var1", "Var2", "Var3", "Var4")
testtable = testtable[c(5,1:4)]
colnames(testtable) = c("Variable","All\n(n = 300)", "Group1\n(n = 120)", "Group2\n(n = 100)", "Group3\n(n = 80)")
```
# Table including %-symbol, escape=F not set
```{r}
testtable %>% mutate_all(linebreak) %>%
kable(format = "latex", align = c("l", "c", "c", "c", "c"), caption = "Caption", booktabs = T, col.names = linebreak(names(testtable), align = "c")) %>%
kable_styling(position = "center", latex_options = c("hold_position")) %>%
footnote(general = "* This is a note to show what * shows in this table plus some addidtional words to make this string a bit longer. Still a bit more", threeparttable = T, general_title = "Anmerkung:", title_format = "italic")
```
# Table including %-symbol, escape=F
This leads to an Error, see pic below
```{r}
testtable %>% mutate_all(linebreak) %>%
kable(format = "latex", align = c("l", "c", "c", "c", "c"), caption = "Caption", booktabs = T, escape = F, col.names = linebreak(names(testtable), align = "c")) %>%
kable_styling(position = "center", latex_options = c("hold_position")) %>%
footnote(general = "* This is a note to show what * shows in this table plus some addidtional words to make this string a bit longer. Still a bit more", threeparttable = T, general_title = "Anmerkung:", title_format = "italic")
```
# Table without %-symbol, escape=F set
```{r}
# removing the %
testtable[,2:5] = apply(testtable[,2:5],2,function(f) gsub("%", "", f))
testtable %>% mutate_all(linebreak) %>%
kable(format = "latex", align = c("l", "c", "c", "c", "c"), caption = "Caption", booktabs = T, escape = F, col.names = linebreak(names(testtable), align = "c")) %>%
kable_styling(position = "center", latex_options = c("hold_position")) %>%
footnote(general = "* This is a note to show what * shows in this table plus some addidtional words to make this string a bit longer. Still a bit more", threeparttable = T, general_title = "Anmerkung:", title_format = "italic")
```
Somehow %-symbol does not get displayed. I have no idea how it comes, since i got other table of the same style (just without a linebreak) and the %-symbol works great.
Answer
Use way 2 with gsub("%", "\\\\%", f)).
---
title: "Untitled"
author: "Stéphane Laurent"
date: "28 août 2018"
output:
pdf_document:
keep_tex: yes
editor_options:
chunk_output_type: console
---
```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE, warning = FALSE, error = FALSE, dev=c('pdf','png'), dpi=500)
library(dplyr)
library(data.table)
library(reshape2)
library(knitr)
library(markdown)
library(kableExtra)
library(psych)
library(survey)
library(ggplot2)
set.seed(123)
testtable = data.frame(matrix(paste0(sample(1:100,16, replace = T), "%"), nrow = 4, byrow = T), stringsAsFactors = F)
testtable$group = c("Var1", "Var2", "Var3", "Var4")
testtable = testtable[c(5,1:4)]
colnames(testtable) = c("Variable","All\n(n = 300)", "Group1\n(n = 120)", "Group2\n(n = 100)", "Group3\n(n = 80)")
```
# Table including %-symbol, escape=F not set
```{r}
testtable %>% mutate_all(linebreak) %>%
kable(format = "latex", align = c("l", "c", "c", "c", "c"), caption = "Caption", booktabs = T, col.names = linebreak(names(testtable), align = "c")) %>%
kable_styling(position = "center", latex_options = c("hold_position")) %>%
footnote(general = "* This is a note to show what * shows in this table plus some addidtional words to make this string a bit longer. Still a bit more", threeparttable = T, general_title = "Anmerkung:", title_format = "italic")
```
# Table including %-symbol, escape=F
This leads to an Error, see pic below
```{r}
testtable[,2:5] = apply(testtable[,2:5],2,function(f) gsub("%", "\\\\%", f))
testtable %>% mutate_all(linebreak) %>%
kable(format = "latex", align = c("l", "c", "c", "c", "c"), caption = "Caption", booktabs = T, escape = F, col.names = linebreak(names(testtable), align = "c")) %>%
kable_styling(position = "center", latex_options = c("hold_position")) %>%
footnote(general = "* This is a note to show what * shows in this table plus some addidtional words to make this string a bit longer. Still a bit more", threeparttable = T, general_title = "Anmerkung:", title_format = "italic")
```
Isnt'it what you want? Otherwise I don't understand.