Feature request: have option of using literal "%" instead of "%".

[travis-leith]

I am using R Markdown to generate an HTML file which includes some tables from gt. Some of the tables include numbers formatted as a percentage. When I load the HTML into an Outlook email, "%" does not get rendered as "%". Would be nice if I had the option of getting gt to use a literal "%" instead of "%".

[joeroe]

Is there any reason to escape % at all? It's not listed here: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-escapes#use

[travis-leith]

Just re-reading my original question, for some of those '%' characters, I had intended to display the escape sequence. However, on my Firefox browser at least, they get re-rendered as '%' characters.
So for the avoidance of doubt, I would like to prevent "& p e r c n t ;" (less the white space) to be output, instead of just a '%' character.

I also get % when using R Markdown with Shiny:

Is there any reason to escape % at all? It's not listed here: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-escapes#use

% is the comment symbol in LaTeX, but it probably only makes sense to escape it for LaTeX output.

I think this is the relevant line of code:

gt/R/utils_formatters.R

Line 427 in 405f63b

html = "%",

When I download the HTML from my Shiny R Markdown app, it's actually showing %. This explains why the escape code is not being automatically translated back into a percentage symbol in Shiny. Presumably Shiny has it's own HTML escaping function, which is converting the & to &, which breaks the escaped percentage symbol.