Enhancement request: Headerless multiline table

[Dris101]

Would it be possible to be able to pass a flag to pandoc.table to explicitly request a headerless multiline table?

[daroczig]

Not sure. Can you please provide a use case when this would be useful? Currently, you can achieve this behavior by not having column names, e.g.:

> pander(unname(head(mtcars)))

----------------------- ---- - --- --- ---- ----- ----- - - - -
     **Mazda RX4**      21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.620 16.46 0 1 4 4

   **Mazda RX4 Wag**    21.0 6 160 110 3.90 2.875 17.02 0 1 4 4

    **Datsun 710**      22.8 4 108 93  3.85 2.320 18.61 1 1 4 1

  **Hornet 4 Drive**    21.4 6 258 110 3.08 3.215 19.44 1 0 3 1

 **Hornet Sportabout**  18.7 8 360 175 3.15 3.440 17.02 0 0 3 2

      **Valiant**       18.1 6 225 105 2.76 3.460 20.22 1 0 3 1
----------------------- ---- - --- --- ---- ----- ----- - - - -

[Dris101]

My use case was a bit weird. I wanted a table with a blank placeholder column. When I set the names to NULL, columns containing only whitespace are removed. Not worth you wasting a lot of time on this! It is something of an edge case! Great package by the way. Many thanks for your work.

> df <- data.frame(a=1:3, b=rep(" ",3), c=1:3)
> pander(df)

-----------
 a   b   c 
--- --- ---
 1       1 

 2       2 

 3       3 
-----------

> pander(unname(df))

-  -
1  1

2  2

3  3
-  -

[daroczig]

Thanks for the example, now I see what's the problem. Unfortunately, this requires a further workaround, as pander removes empty columns (as the width of that is zero). But if you fill in the placeholder column with e.g. a non-breaking space, it should work:

> df <- data.frame(a = 1:3, b = '&nbsp;', c = 1:3)
> pander(unname(df))

- ------ -
1 &nbsp; 1

2 &nbsp; 2

3 &nbsp; 3
- ------ -

Although I'd rather handle that at the print level:

> df <- data.frame(a = 1:3, b = NA, c = 1:3)
> pander(unname(df), missing = '&nbsp;')

- ------ -
1 &nbsp; 1

2 &nbsp; 2

3 &nbsp; 3
- ------ -

Please let me know how this works for you. Meanwhile, I'll work on #224 (should be fixed in 24 hrs).

[daroczig]

@Dris101, does the above example works for you as a workaround?

[daroczig]

I suppose the above suggested workaround works fine, please reopen if not.