Printing linebreaks in HTML kable table

Question

When creating tables using kable, is there a way to generate a line break (ie < br >) when string in a data.frame 'dt' has \n ?

For example, here:

library(data.table); 
dt <- fread("https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.datacamp.com/blog_assets/prince_raw_data.csv")
dt <- dt[301:303,2:6] #take three songs only

library(knitr); library(kableExtra)
kable(dt);
# use this line to view it:   dt %>% kable %>% kable_styling()

This relates to Automated nicely formated book of lyrics from data.frame using markdown, knitr and glue:

Thanks for making a reproducible example, but it is not generally recommended on Stackoverflow to use external data sources. Hope my answer helps and shows how a really basic dataframe can be made very easily :) — Michael Harper, Jul 13 '18 at 09:44

Michael Harper · Answer 1 · 2018-07-13T09:41:03.973

As the text strings contain linebreaks in the format \n, you could replace all of these with the equivalent HTML tag <br>. I prefer using str_replace_all from the package stringr but you could also consider using gsub from base R

Here is a reproducible example:

---
output: html_document
---

```{r}
library(stringr)


dt <- data.frame(text = c("Here is some sample text \nHere is some sample text\n", 
                          "Here is more sample text \nAgain with a linebreak"),
                 name = c("Name 1", "Name 2"))
dt$text <- stringr::str_replace_all(dt$text, "\\n", "<br>")

knitr::kable(dt)
```

If you aren't compiling the file to an HTML R Markdown output, you can also use dt %>% kable(format = "html",escape = FALSE) %>% kable_styling() to display it. Note that escape=FALSE prevents the linebreaks being messed up.

Printing linebreaks in HTML kable table

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