Can cells overflow in kable, kableExtra?

Question

I am simulating a WhatsApp conversation with Kable. Since I have a column for each of the two chatters, long text wraps to fit cells. I'would like the text to overflow to each other chatter's column to better simulate a conversation.

chat <- tibble(
  john = c("looooooooooong sentence1", NA, "looooooooooong sentence2", NA),
  jane = c(NA, "even looooooooooongerrrrrrrrrr sentence1", NA, "even looooooooooongerrrrrr sentence2"))

chat %>% 
  knitr::kable( format = "html", 
                table.attr = "style='width:50%;'",
                align = "lr", 
                col.names = NULL) %>%
  row_spec(which(!is.na(chat$jane)), background = "#DCF8C6")

My Output:

What I want:

I also set up options(knitr.kable.NA = '') in order to hide NAs

Answer 1

Here's a possible approach using the align argument of row_spec to control the text.

library(tibble)
library(knitr)
library(kableExtra)
library(tidyr)
library(dplyr)

# convert table into long format
chat <- 
  chat |>  
  pivot_longer(everything()) |> 
  na.omit()

chat |> 
  select(value) |> 
  kable( format = "html", 
                table.attr = "style='width:50%;'",
                col.names = NULL) |>
  column_spec(1, width = "100mm") |> 
  row_spec(which(chat$name == "jane"), background = "#DCF8C6", align = "r")