Rmarkdown is printing the latex code in the knited PDF

Question

I am running in an odd result. I have inserted a number of tables in my document in Rmarkdown. This is the YAML:

---
output:
  pdf_document:
    toc: true
    toc_depth: 2
    number_sections: true
header-includes:
 \usepackage{float}
 \floatplacement{figure}{H}
 \floatplacement{table}{H}
---

And the first chunk:

{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE,
                      fig.pos = "H",
                      fig.width=8,
                      fig.height=7,
                      tab.pos = "H",
                      collapse = TRUE,
                      message = FALSE,
                      warning = FALSE,
                      comment = "#>"
)

knitr::opts_knit$set(root.dir = rprojroot::find_rstudio_root_file())

options(knitr.kable.NA = "-")

The tables are inserted in this manner:

kable(tableX, caption = "Caption", booktabs = TRUE) %>% 
  row_spec(0, bold=TRUE) %>% 
  kable_styling(bootstrap_options = "condensed") %>% 
  column_spec(1, italic = TRUE)

Now, most tables are inserted correctly, but there is just one which is printed with the latex code, \begin{table}, then \caption{}, then the table, and at the end \end{table}. How is it possible that one table is being printed in this manner with the code being the same?

Thank you

Answer 1

As the author of rmarkdown Yihui Xie noted here, you can disable the character-escaping argument in kable() to include LaTeX's spacial characters in the table caption, or column/row names, or both. Then you need to manually escape such characters by adding \\ before each special character.

```{r tab1, echo=F}
tableX=data.frame(col1 = "Empty data frame")
kable(
  tableX,
  caption  = "Caption 20\\%",
  booktabs = TRUE,
  escape   = FALSE
  ) |> 
  row_spec(0, bold=TRUE) |>
  kable_styling(bootstrap_options = "condensed") %>% 
  column_spec(1, italic = TRUE)
```