Keep leading whitespace 🙏

[MayaGans]

Hey Rich and co!

I created a data frame with intentional leading whitespace and it looks like converting to a gt object automatically removes this?

the_data <- data.frame(
  spacey = c("No space", "    Four Spaces", "    Four Spaces")
)

# my spaces are gone :(
the_data(gt)

I attempted to get clever and replace the whitespaces with &nbsp

encode_whitespace <- function(strg) {
  gsub(" ", '&nbsp;', strg)
}

the_data %>%
  mutate(spacey = encode_whitespace(spacey)) %>%
  gt()

But 🤦 this is interpreted as literal text womp womp. Hoping you have a better idea! 🤞

PS as a more general feature request: this might be too opinionated but just throwing it out there.... it would align with my mental model for the default behavior of gt() to keep any user created whitespace before generating the table. In my mind this puts the onus on the user to clean up rather than have gt do it for us? Just a thought!

Oh and thanks again for this package it's the GOAT table generator ❤️

[rich-iannone]

Thanks for filing this issue! This is something that irritated me before. There should definitely be some whitespace options (globally and probably also in md(), html(), and fmt_markdown()).

Speaking of fmt_markdown(), I think there is a workaround here. If you use fmt_markdown() with the spacey column, you should get whitespace preserved because of those entities.