If I'm not wrong, there are two ways to create markdown tables with pander package: either use the pandoc.table() function or the generic function pander(). However with pander() function, it seems that you cannot use the arguments from pandoc.table()
For example :
library(pander)
data(iris)
pandoc.table(summary(iris), split.table="Inf")
pander(summary(iris), split.table="Inf")
With pandoc.table, the table is not split because of the argument split.table (that's the intended behavior). But with pander, the argument is ignored.
I see in the code of the function that the ... argument is present in pander.data.frame but is not respecified within it. :
> pander:::pander.data.frame
function (x, caption = attr(x, "caption"), ...)
{
if (is.null(caption) & !is.null(storage$caption))
caption <- get.caption()
pandoc.table(x, caption = caption)
}
Why not reuse the ... argument inside the function to allow passing arguments from pander to pandoc.table (like below)? There is maybe a good reason for this of course...
function (x, caption = attr(x, "caption"), ...)
{
if (is.null(caption) & !is.null(storage$caption))
caption <- get.caption()
pandoc.table(x, caption = caption,...)
}
While processing pandoc.table arguments via the pander method is a reasonable idea (and I will definitely allow this solution in the next release, thanks for the question!), this can be also addressed more globally with general pander options. E.g.:
> library(pander)
> data(iris)
> panderOptions('table.split.table', 'Inf')
> pander(head(iris))
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
-------------- ------------- -------------- ------------- ---------
5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
4.9 3 1.4 0.2 setosa
4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2 setosa
5 3.6 1.4 0.2 setosa
5.4 3.9 1.7 0.4 setosa
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Update [2013/06/11]: a recent commit resolved this issue and now you can pass those extra params to pandoc.table via pander S3 method:
> pander(summary(iris), split.table="Inf")
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
------ -------------- ------------- -------------- ------------- -------------
**** Min. :4.300 Min. :2.000 Min. :1.000 Min. :0.100 setosa :50
**** 1st Qu.:5.100 1st Qu.:2.800 1st Qu.:1.600 1st Qu.:0.300 versicolor:50
**** Median :5.800 Median :3.000 Median :4.350 Median :1.300 virginica :50
**** Mean :5.843 Mean :3.057 Mean :3.758 Mean :1.199
**** 3rd Qu.:6.400 3rd Qu.:3.300 3rd Qu.:5.100 3rd Qu.:1.800
**** Max. :7.900 Max. :4.400 Max. :6.900 Max. :2.500
------------------------------------------------------------------------------