Flexible Column names in knitr::kable table

Question

Problem:

Have a large df with many variables. Trying to create a summary kable table with different column names than the original variables.

library(knitr)
library(dplyr)

knitr::kable(iris %>% head(),
             col.names = c("Sepal length", "Sepal width", "Petal length",
                           "Petal width", "Species"))

| Sepal length| Sepal width| Petal length| Petal width|Species |
|------------:|-----------:|------------:|-----------:|:-------|
|          5.1|         3.5|          1.4|         0.2|setosa  |
|          4.9|         3.0|          1.4|         0.2|setosa  |
|          4.7|         3.2|          1.3|         0.2|setosa  |
|          4.6|         3.1|          1.5|         0.2|setosa  |
|          5.0|         3.6|          1.4|         0.2|setosa  |
|          5.4|         3.9|          1.7|         0.4|setosa  |

I want to be able to select specific columns without having to manually rename them via:

knitr::kable(iris %>% filter(Species == "setosa") %>% 
           select(Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, Species) %>% head(),
         col.names = c("Sepal length", "Sepal width", "Species"))

| Sepal length| Sepal width|Species |
|------------:|-----------:|:-------|
|          5.1|         3.5|setosa  |
|          4.9|         3.0|setosa  |
|          4.7|         3.2|setosa  |
|          4.6|         3.1|setosa  |
|          5.0|         3.6|setosa  |
|          5.4|         3.9|setosa  |

Is there a way to specify only once that I want "Sepal.Length" to be "Sepal Length." That way if I include a certain variable, my code will recognize the variable and rename it to a new column name automatically without me having to go back and do it manually?

Rename the columns before calling `kable`; you can use something like `rename_all(str_replace_all, "\\.", " ")` to replace all periods in column names with spaces — camille, Dec 01 '19 at 23:45

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 01 '19 at 19:39

Why not rename the columns up front, and use the formatted column names in subsequent calls to filter and select?

library(tidyverse)

rename(iris, `Sepal length` = Sepal.Length, `Sepal width` = Sepal.Width) %>% 
  filter(Species == "setosa") %>% 
  select(contains("Sepal"), Species) %>% 
  head() %>% 
  knitr::kable()


| Sepal length| Sepal width|Species |
|------------:|-----------:|:-------|
|          5.1|         3.5|setosa  |
|          4.9|         3.0|setosa  |
|          4.7|         3.2|setosa  |
|          4.6|         3.1|setosa  |
|          5.0|         3.6|setosa  |
|          5.4|         3.9|setosa  |

Flexible Column names in knitr::kable table

1 Answers1