Myujth

After several hours of searching for an answer to no avail, I thought I'd seek advice here.

I'm trying to produce some very simple html tables using knitr in r markdown, but I can't get the latex symbols to display correctly in the column names.

Example code, with several different symbols:

kable(data.frame("$^3$" = "a",
 "$\epsilon^2$" = "b",
 "$%$" = "c"),
 escape = F)

As you can see the column names are not formatted X..3. X..epsilon.2. X...

Any help would be much appreciated

You can use those column names in a data frame, but you need to tell the data.frame function not to mangle them using check.names = FALSE.
However, this isn't enough to fix your example, because $%$ is not legal LaTeX.
You need to escape the percent sign or it will be taken to be a comment character.
So this works:

my_data <- data.frame("$^3$" = "a",
 "$\epsilon^2$" = "b",
 "$\%$" = "c",
 check.names = FALSE)
kable(my_data)

You can set the col.names in your kable-call. It does not work in your data.frame-call, because that does not allow column names which don't start with a dot or letter.
You can see this here:

my_data <- data.frame("$^3$" = "a",
 "$\epsilon^2$" = "b",
 "$%$" = "c")
my_data
 X..3. X..epsilon.2. X...
1 a b c

The solution is:

kable(my_data, escape = F, 
 col.names = c("$^3$", "$\epsilon^2$", "$%$"))

You might want to use varepsilon instead of epsilon as this gives a prettier epsilon (in my opinion).

kable(my_data, escape = F, 
 col.names = c("$^3$", "$\varepsilon^2$", "$%$"))