I am rendering an html document in Quarto (engine: knitr). I have added some trailing whitespaces in a kableExtra table using " ". However, as soon as I add pack_rows() to the mix, " " is rendered as text in the table. Any idea why this is happening and how I can fix it? Using escape = FALSE within kable() does not help.

This works as intended:

library(tidyverse)
library(kableExtra)

set.seed(404)

mtcars_tbl <- 
  mtcars %>% 
  mutate(
    p = round(runif(nrow(.), 0, .1), 2),
    p = case_when(
      p < .05 ~ paste0(p, "*"),
      TRUE ~ paste0(p, "&nbsp;&nbsp;")
    )
  ) %>%
  select(mpg, hp, p)

mtcars_tbl %>% 
  head() %>% 
  kable(align = "lrrr")

This does not:

mtcars_tbl %>% 
  head() %>% 
  kable(align = "lrrr") %>% 
  pack_rows(index = c("group 1" = 3, "group 2" = 3))

Thanks in advance for any tips!

When you add pack_rows(), HTML entities like   are being treated as literal text rather than being interpreted as HTML. But, you can use unicode spaces instead `"\u00A0\u00A0":

Code

```{r}
#| echo: false

library(tidyverse)
library(kableExtra)

set.seed(404)
mtcars_tbl <- 
  mtcars %>% 
  mutate(
    p = round(runif(nrow(.), 0, .1), 2),
    p = case_when(
      p < .05 ~ paste0(p, "*"),
      TRUE ~ paste0(p, "\u00A0\u00A0")
    )
  ) %>%
  select(mpg, hp, p)

mtcars_tbl %>% 
  head() %>% 
  kable(align = "lrrr", escape = FALSE) %>% 
  pack_rows(index = c("group 1" = 3, "group 2" = 3))

```

If you want to do something similar for more significance values (**, ***) you can pad whitespaces based on the most significant p-value:

Code - conditional padding

---
title: "add spaces"
format: html
editor: visual
---

## Quarto

```{r}
#| echo: false

library(tidyverse)
library(kableExtra)

set.seed(404)
mtcars_tbl <- 
  mtcars %>% 
  mutate(
    p = round(runif(nrow(.), 0.003, .012), 3),
    p = case_when(
      p < .05 & p >= 0.01  ~ paste0(p, "*"),
      p < .01 ~ paste0(p, "**"),
      TRUE ~ as.character(p)  # Convert to character before processing
    )
  ) %>%
  mutate(
    max_length = max(nchar(p)),  # Get max string length
    p = str_pad(p, width = max_length, side = "right", pad = "\u00A0")  # Pad with non-breaking spaces
  ) %>%
  select(mpg, hp, p)

mtcars_tbl %>% 
  head() %>% 
  kable(align = "lrrr", escape = FALSE) %>% 
  pack_rows(index = c("group 1" = 3, "group 2" = 3))

```