Dash "-" character not being escaped

[vrybkin]

Hi @haozhu233, thank you again for this wonderful package and your time. Others may have pointed this out already - but I could not find it previously - that kableExtra 0.8.0 does not currently escape the - dash character and converts it to a really ugly looking black dot. I know you can can call it with \- but sometimes it can be a pain to go through every table and replace these instances as it makes the tables less readable outside of this package. A quick markdown example is below. Curiously, this is not an issue in shiny, where the - character renders fine.

---
output: 
  html_document
---

```{r, results = "hide", message = F, warning = F}
library(knitr) # 1.20
library(magrittr)
library(kableExtra) # 0.8.0

D = data.frame(x = LETTERS[1:2], y = c("\\-", "-"))
kable(x = D, format = "html", escape = F) %>% kableExtra::kable_styling()

Any idea how to fix this downstream in the kableExtra call? If not - it would be a great feature in the future!

[haozhu233]

@vrybkin In fact, the conversion from - to that "ugly looking black dot" happens when pandoc converts from md to html: It recognizes it as the list symbol... Proof is that if you run this thing in r console and see the results in RStudio viewer, you will see the original "-". That means that unfortunately I can't do anything to help you in this case. :P

[vrybkin]

@haozhu233 Thank you for the note! That is too bad that pandoc does that. I ended up using  -  instead as it renders nicely in both shiny and markdown. \\- renders properly in markdown, but not shiny.

[haozhu233]

@vrybkin I read a note somewhere else last week that you can use -- instead - in this case. You can get a lightly longer dash which won't get converted by pandoc.

[AndrewC160]

Just to add a solution to this, I have been able to add "\" to columns with "+" or "-" values to escape them manually, so:

table %>%
mutate(strand1 = paste0("\\",strand1), strand2 = paste0("\\",strand2) %>%
kable %>%
kable_styling(full_width=FALSE)