Using Markdown formatting in table using kable in quarto

Question

Using quarto's HMTL-output functionalities, I am trying to produce a kable from a data.frame that contains some Markdown-style formatting that should show up in the final document. In the actual use case, I have a number of documents already formatted this way and I would like re-use these commands for correctly rendering the output.

Here's my example.qmd:

---
title: "example"
format: 
  html
---

```{r setup}
library(kableExtra)
```

```{r}
#| echo: false
data.frame(Function = "`read_delim()`",
           Formula = "$\\leftarrow$",
           Break = "this continues on a<br>new line",
           Link = "[Google](www.google.com)") |>
  kbl(format = "html") 
```

After running the chunk, the preview in RStudio does display the arrow and line break correctly, but ` ` and the link fail to have an effect:

When rendering the qmd to HTML, the result looks like this, i.e. ignores the formatting:

What am I missing? Is there a way to include such formatting commands into a kable when rendering a quarto document to HTML?

Answer 1

When creating a table in Quarto, you can't mix Markdown with HTML - the Markdown syntax won't be processed within the HTML table.

This R code would work

data.frame(Function = "`read_delim()`",
           Formula = "$\\leftarrow$",
           Break = "this continues on a<br>new line",
           Link = "[Google](www.google.com)") |>
  kbl(format = "markdown") 

So if you can, output only Markdown table which knitr::kable() should do by default.

If you need to output a HTML table (e.g for specific HTML features), you need to use a framework that will render the markdown for you while creating the HTML table.

• gt with fmt_markdown() and md()
• flextable with ftextra and colformat_md() or as_paragraph_md

This is possible that this limitation of note being able to include raw Markdown inside HTML table will be improve in the future (https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/discussions/957#discussioncomment-2807907)