Problems rendering table using r Markdown, kable and kableExtra

Question

I am attempting to output a latex table using r markdown, kable and kableExtra. I get an error in the table rendering code that is not part of the latex code produced by R.

The code:

outTab <- m.OutTab %>%
    kable(format='latex',  booktabs=T ,
          #caption = "Population Trend",
          digits=1, 
          row.names=FALSE, 
          align='lccccc', 
          col.names = names_spaced,
          escape = FALSE)

where "m.OutTab" is an matrix that contains the table to be rendered,

The error:

Error producing PDF.
! Misplaced \noalign.
\addlinespace ->\noalign 
                         {\ifnum 0=`}\fi \@ifnextchar [{\@addspace }{\@addsp...
l.116    \addlinespace

Error: pandoc document conversion failed with error 43

These codes ("\noalign ...") is not part of "outTab".

Any idea how to work around this error?

Masque

Hi, you are not giving enough information in your code, I tried but cannot reproduce your problem. I have to guess what is names_spaced or the format of your table at the beginning. Possibly add header-includes: - \usepackage{booktabs} but hard to know if that' s your problem – Footed

I have this same problem. I have a simple pdf markdown with a single chart. When I knit it without kableExtra, using only knitr::kable(chart), no problem. When I knit it having loaded kableExtra, even if I don't use any functions from that package to alter my chart, I get the following error: Error producing PDF. ! Misplaced \noalign. \hline ->\noalign {\ifnum 0=`}\fi \let \hskip \vskip \let \vrule \hrule \let... l.109 \hline Error: pandoc document conversion failed with error 43 – Ubiquitous

I have discovered that I only get the error when I have "escape = T" in the kable call. escape = F does not give the error, although the pdf renders the chart with a bunch of html code in the table cells instead of the actual values. – Ubiquitous

Answer 1

If you are using bookdown, this could be caused by using non-alphanumeric characters in your code chunk label. I had a similar problem which was solved by removing an underscore.

Unrig

I have been fighting with strange errors like this for hours! This was the solution: Knitr doesn't handle underscore in captions correctly, so don't use them. – Fefeal

Also caused by using non-alphanumeric characters in the caption if you are using caption = "..." instead of the code chunk to caption your table :) – Hex

Answer 2

I have encountered this problem. I seem to be able to fix it by specifying format="pandoc" or format="markdown". If seems to be some issue with how latex output from kable is handled.

Joinery

Answer 3

It seems like this question is getting a lot of traffic. If you see an error like that, that means that there are something wrong with the raw latex you wrote. Check special symbols like < \ / [] and make sure they are properly escaped by yourself.

Due to running mechanism, a lot of places with kableExtra requires double escape, which means that you need to type \\\\ to get a \. You should be able to get it work after a few attempts.

Aleph

The error cannot mean that 'there [is] something wrong with the raw LaTeX you wrote' because the question relates to LaTeX generated by knitr and kableExtra from an RMarkdown source. – Chase

I had a '%' symbol in a column with cell_spec() which screwed the whole thing up and took me hours to find this solution. Apparently '%' needs to be escaped ('escape = TRUE') in order for knittr to work, but cell_spec() needs 'escape = FALSE' in order to work. So I had to rewrite '%' to '\\\\%' and it finally worked. The problem is that this isn't a bug in kableExtra. kableExtra doesn't know if you have other columns needing to be escaped. I think the real problem here is the completely useless error messages. – Hemelytron

Answer 4

I had a similar issue, although my error message was slightly different:

! Misplaced \noalign.
\addlinespace ->\noalign 
                     {\ifnum 0=`}\fi \@ifnextchar [{\@addspace }{\@addsp...
l.376 \end{tabu}
Error: Failed to compile

In my case, adding

format = "latex"

and

full_width = FALSE

solved it.

Alfieri