Error in FlexTable cell text when generating html from Rmd if text starts with `<`

[jrvianna]

When generating a html from a Rmd document, if the text in a cell starts with <, the resulting text would include <span style=“font-size:11pt;font-family:Times New Roman;color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1);”> before the proper text (Using Rstudio Knit HTML button). This doesn't happen when visualizing the FlexTable object in the Viewer tab, or when saving to a word file with writeDoc.

Reproducible code chunk example:

table <- data.frame(Variable = c("A", "B", "C"), P.value = c("0.05", "<0.01", "a<0.01"))
vanilla.table(table)

Session Info

## R version 3.3.1 (2016-06-21)
## Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
## Running under: OS X 10.11.5 (El Capitan)
## 
## locale:
## [1] en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/C/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] ReporteRs_0.8.6     ReporteRsjars_0.0.2
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] Rcpp_0.12.6       png_0.1-7         digest_0.6.10    
##  [4] mime_0.5          R.methodsS3_1.7.1 R6_2.1.2         
##  [7] xtable_1.8-2      magrittr_1.5      evaluate_0.9     
## [10] gdtools_0.0.7     stringi_1.1.1     R.oo_1.20.0      
## [13] R.utils_2.3.0     xml2_1.0.0        rmarkdown_1.0    
## [16] tools_3.3.1       stringr_1.0.0     shiny_0.13.2     
## [19] httpuv_1.3.3      rJava_0.9-8       htmltools_0.3.5  
## [22] rvg_0.1.0         knitr_1.14

PS: Thanks very much for the wonderful package!

[davidgohel]

OK,

< (and few other characters) should be translated into HTML codes. Until it's been solved, a workaround could be:

table <- data.frame(Variable = c("A", "B", "C"), P.value = c("0.05", "&lt;0.01", "a&lt;0.01"))
vanilla.table(table)

This will be rendered as expected within an HTML document but not within a Word document...

David